Transcript
00:00:00I want to talk to you today about something that's shockingly common, which is family
00:00:04estrangement, where people in the same family are not talking to each other. I'm talking about a
00:00:09parent, I'm talking about a child, I'm talking about a sibling, perhaps I'm talking about a
00:00:14grandparent. Not more than that. I'm not talking about your crazy Uncle Mike. When I say it's a
00:00:18tragedy, I actually really mean it. Over time, the majority who have experienced this estrangement
00:00:24or provoked this estrangement, they wind up with chronic unhappiness. There's a major
00:00:30elevated risk of depression and they also have poor physical health. But here's the point.
00:00:34There might be influencers, politicians, media telling you to ditch your family members because
00:00:41they have mistaken values, bad ideas, or really vile politics. But that's wrong. The ones who
00:00:48don't love and care about you are the people encouraging you to pull away from your family.
00:00:54Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. The mission of this show is to lift
00:01:04people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using real research, real
00:01:09science, and real ideas. I want to put those ideas in your hands, not just so that you can
00:01:13use them in your own life, but that you can join me as a teacher of love and happiness with
00:01:18other people. Thank you for continuing with the show. The show is now going on a year old
00:01:22at this point, and we have a lot of people that are joining every day. Thank you for being one of
00:01:26those people and for recommending the show to other people so that we can spread our mission,
00:01:29so that we can spread these ideas to other people as widely as possible. As always,
00:01:34please do feedback on how you like the show, what you'd like to see more of, what you'd like to see
00:01:39less of. And the way to do that is by sending me an email at officehours at arthurbrooks.com,
00:01:43or you can leave a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this show.
00:01:48As always, please do like and subscribe. That helps us with the algorithm to reach more people.
00:01:52If you would like more content like this, please just subscribe to my newsletter. You can get that
00:01:56at my website, arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. And if you're ready to do some work in person,
00:02:04if you want to meet me, I'm actually doing a retreat for the Modern Elder Academy. I'm going to bring this
00:02:10to life through a series of retreats actually in Santa Fe, and you can learn more about that. You can
00:02:14actually come to the retreat and talk to me at retreats at arthurbrooks.com. And on the website,
00:02:18by the way, there's all kinds of new ways to join communities, virtual and in real life. We're
00:02:23expanding the reach of all the work that we're doing on the science of human happiness. Thanks to you. I
00:02:29really appreciate everything that you're doing.
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00:04:25show is not about happiness per se, but a major source of unhappiness, how we can deal with it,
00:04:31how we can cure it, and we can help other people as well. I want to talk to you today about something
00:04:36that's shockingly common, which is family estrangement, where people in the same family
00:04:40are not talking to each other. People who maybe even have, as I say today, no contact with one
00:04:47another. What is the effect of that? What is, how does it affect the people who are the recipients of
00:04:51or the initiators of no contact? What do the data say? What do the studies show? That's what we're
00:04:56going to get into. And just as important as anything else, if you are no contact with one of your family
00:05:00members, what can you do? What should you do? This is going to be a practical show as always. I'm going
00:05:07to start by talking about why it's a tragedy, actually, for a lot of people, how we actually
00:05:12grieve neurobiologically when it happens. Why does it happen? What's the typical outcome? How do
00:05:19these things usually resolve? And then the magic ingredients to healing it in your life, and perhaps
00:05:25so you can recommend that to the lives of other people. Now, this has been in the news a little bit
00:05:30recently. I mean, you see these no contact movement things are in the news. And one of the ways that this
00:05:35was brought to my attention, and I wrote about it in my column in the free press,
00:05:39was when there was a major sort of front page incident in a very famous family, that of David
00:05:45and Victoria Beckham. He's a famous footballer, and his wife was a pop music star, and they're very
00:05:51glamorous, and they're in the news a lot, and all sort of the celebrity gossip there and that.
00:05:55And they have an adult son who's in his 20s, and he announced very publicly that he was going no
00:05:59contact with his parents for a list of grievances having to do with the way that he was raised,
00:06:03in the way that they treated him and continued to treat him and his wife. I think he's 27 years old.
00:06:09And it really brought to the surface a lot of conversations about that. A lot of people,
00:06:14when I wrote my column about that, a lot of people wrote into the comment section,
00:06:18yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. And it was so shocking that it was really worth looking at
00:06:23the data on this. How common is it, and why actually does it occur? And that's a lot of what
00:06:29I want to talk about. But as I mentioned before, I want to also get to the solutions, because that's
00:06:33what this show is really all about. Now, when I call family estrangement, and by this, I mean
00:06:38not having, literally not having contact with somebody in your immediate family. I'm talking
00:06:42about a parent. I'm talking about a child. I'm talking about a sibling. Perhaps I'm talking about
00:06:47a grandparent. Not more than that. I'm not talking about your crazy Uncle Mike. I'm talking about
00:06:51somebody in your immediate family with whom you actually don't have a, you're not on speaking
00:06:55terms. When I say it's a tragedy, I actually really mean it. There's really good data from the Pew
00:07:01Research Center in Washington, D.C. This is one of the best sources of survey data in the world,
00:07:06actually. And the Pew Research Center does survey-based research in a lot of different countries.
00:07:12Recently, as recently as 2021, they fielded an international survey asking people what gave
00:07:18their life meaning. What gives your life meaning? It was a long list of things that you could choose.
00:07:22So it's not always an open-ended survey where people could say, you know, my pet frog, Barney.
00:07:26No, not that. It was going to be a list of kind of ordinary things so that we could coalesce
00:07:31around the most common things that we find in different countries. And one of them was family.
00:07:36Does family give you meaning? And it turns out that of the vast majority of the countries,
00:07:41as a matter of fact, 14 of the 17 countries. And the survey, family was number one. It was above
00:07:48making a living. It was above health. It was above friendships. It was above everything else. It
00:07:52was family. This included the United States. It included most of Western Europe. It included
00:07:57countries all over Asia. No joke. For the biggest part of the world across cultural differences,
00:08:03family is number one. And so the result of that is, is very easy to understand why when people lose
00:08:09contact with their family, they lose a major source and sense of their life's meaning. Now,
00:08:13as you know, this is what I write about. My book is sitting right here because I always have my latest
00:08:17book sitting next to me. It's called The Meaning of Your Life. And so this is something you say in the
00:08:22corner pocket of what I've been thinking about for the past five years. When somebody says,
00:08:27my life feels meaningless, one of the first questions I ask them when I'm actually helping somebody is,
00:08:31okay, tell me about your family. Tell me about your family relationships. And inevitably,
00:08:34there'll be something like, yeah, no, I mean, I have a cordial relationship with my siblings. I don't
00:08:39really talk to my parents or I really, or I propulsively don't talk to my parents at all.
00:08:44I see this a lot. And this just makes people feel bereft of a sense of the significance,
00:08:49the purpose, the coherence they actually feel in their life. Lots and lots of studies on this.
00:08:54And I'll throw into the notes the link to the Pew Research Center data, which is really useful.
00:09:01Now, why? Why? And as always, I'm going to go back to a little bit of the neuroscience behind this.
00:09:06There's an importance of kin relations that's almost certainly biologically ingrained. As I've
00:09:12mentioned so many times on this show, human beings, homo sapiens, we have brains that are very similar,
00:09:19basically identical to what they were 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period,
00:09:23when all humans, virtually all humans lived in small kin-related bands of 30 to 50 individuals.
00:09:29And they were responsible for taking care of each other. There was no fire department,
00:09:33no police force, there were no hospitals, there were no doctors, at least as we understand doctors
00:09:38today. And so the result is you got to take care of each other. And if you don't, well, guess what?
00:09:43Everybody's at risk and nobody's going to pass on their genes. And you have a very strong ingrained
00:09:50biological imperative to take care of each other. Your kin-based relationships are really,
00:09:54really important. That's the evolutionary biology behind it. But we actually see a lot of pretty
00:09:59interesting experimental psychology that bears this out. So for example, there are a bunch of
00:10:04psychological experiments that ask people to distribute money to other people. They got a lot
00:10:09of choices. You know, they have, you know, 20 bucks and they can give some to some and some to another
00:10:12person. And they have a list of people they have to give the money to. Now on this list, in these
00:10:18experiments, you'll have kin-based people you're blood-related to or family-related to, and you'll
00:10:23have really, really close friends. Almost inevitably, people are closer, they're more intimate with their
00:10:30friends than they are with their relatives. And if that's you, that's really, really common. There are
00:10:34things that you'll tell your friends you'd never tell your mom. There might be things you would tell
00:10:38your friends that you wouldn't tell your sibling or even your spouse, as a matter of fact. And your
00:10:43spouse is actually both in the friend group and in the kin group. If you're married, that's an adoption,
00:10:48is kind of how that works. They wanted to know who do you give more to, intimate friends or relatives
00:10:53with whom you're less intimate, but related by blood, or at least by family. And what they find
00:10:58is that people give significantly more to family than they do to friends. They just do because they
00:11:03feel this sense of familial obligation. Really interesting study on that from 2008 called
00:11:09Altruism Among Relatives and Non-Relatives. That kind of sums it up. And that's what they always find.
00:11:14They feel like they owe more to people with whom they're less intimate, socially, and with whom
00:11:21they would actually share even fewer secrets. Now, this, interestingly, generally speaking,
00:11:26is thought to be less in the West than it is in other parts of the world. So there is some
00:11:31cultural variation in this. And some people believe that this is one of the effects of
00:11:35Christianity, as a matter of fact. So, you know, Matthew 5, 44, the Christian Bible,
00:11:39love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. But the whole concept behind a lot of the
00:11:44Christian teaching, which was very, very unusual, and some would say even counter to our natural
00:11:50evolutionary biology, is you have to treat people who are not your kin as if they were your kin.
00:11:56You know, I guess what's the word in Chinese, in Mandarin Chinese, is guanxi, you know,
00:12:00your kin-based relations. And the whole idea for a lot of Christianity is everybody's your guanxi.
00:12:06And so the concept that you got to, you know, it's okay to treat people in your family more ethically
00:12:12or more honestly than other people, that's sort of proscribed by many religions, but especially
00:12:18Christianity. And so there is a hypothesis that I've seen in many places that that's one of the
00:12:23reasons that it's so unusual that in the West people will be so good to strangers. That's not
00:12:28common in the evolutionary milieu. That's the whole idea. Okay. I mean, you decide whether or not that's
00:12:35the case based on your own experience, but that's at least a hypothesis that one commonly sees.
00:12:42Neuroscientists have found that our brains actually work differently when our families are cohesively
00:12:46versus when they're not. To not be cohesive with our families, to have estrangement, to have schism,
00:12:51kind of breaks our brain, as a matter of fact. I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute,
00:12:56but there's some really interesting studies from a journal called Social Neuroscience on exactly how
00:13:00that works. And once again, this has got to be related to our evolutionary biology, where our
00:13:05prehistoric survival depended on mutual support of kin. And so when it's not, it's going to signal to you
00:13:10that you're at threat. When your family is dysfunctional, it's going to signal to you that
00:13:14you're in danger of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone, or something along those lines. Maybe
00:13:20not that dramatic, but there's something in you that says, this isn't right. This isn't right.
00:13:24We got to fix this. This isn't right. Social scientists, more modern social scientists,
00:13:28psychologists in particular, have looked at this. And there's a really good book published in 2020,
00:13:33once again, this goes into the show notes, called Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Amend Them,
00:13:40by a sociologist and gerontologist by the name of Carl Pillemer. And he has the best data I've ever
00:13:46seen available on families, which comes from Cornell University. It's called the Cornell Family
00:13:50Estrangement and Reconciliation Project, right? Good, right? This is the best data on families falling
00:13:54apart and families getting back together, which studies the long-term effects of family schisms.
00:13:59So this is a good book, and I recommend it to you. It gives you a lot of information and the best data
00:14:04set available on why people break up and why people get back together from their families, not from their
00:14:10couples. What he finds is the following, and this is a big punchline I want to come back to in a
00:14:16minute, so I want to get it right out right there now. Many people, when they walk away from their
00:14:20families or go no contact with their families, more on that movement in a minute, that they do get
00:14:24short-term relief. I mean, nobody says, "You know what? I think I'm going to stop talking to my mom so
00:14:28I can be miserable for the rest of my life." Said no one ever. There's a reason you stop talking to mom.
00:14:33And in point of fact, that people do get short-term relief. But what his research shows,
00:14:37because it's longitudinal data over a long period of time, that the majority of people who go no contact of
00:14:43their own volition, in other words, the person didn't kick them out, they kicked themselves out
00:14:48of their families or somebody out of their family, effectively, that over time, the majority who
00:14:55have experienced this estrangement or provoked this estrangement, they wind up with chronic unhappiness.
00:15:01And there's a major elevated risk of depression, and they also have poor physical health. So the short-term
00:15:07versus the long-term is really, really important. Sure, there's relief in the short-term. And again,
00:15:12I'm going to come back and talk about the legitimate reasons for doing this. This is not an argument,
00:15:17necessarily, a prima facie argument against estrangement. I'm just talking, I'm reporting
00:15:22on what people typically see. Short-term relief, long-term suffering is what it comes down to
00:15:28in the majority of cases. And that long-term suffering is very much associated with feelings of grief.
00:15:34And so family estrangement is quite similar in its long-term emotional impacts on people from the
00:15:39death and bereavement because of a loved one. And I have a, I've done a show on grief before,
00:15:44and I'll put that, I'll make sure that that's linked below as well. So if you want to look at grief
00:15:49and how that affects things, it's quite similar in the case of estrangement. It affects your brain
00:15:55in much the same way as the bottom line. Okay. Now, if it's so painful, it should be rare, but it isn't.
00:16:03It isn't rare at all. There's a very, one of the most famous lines in, in the world of literature is
00:16:08that of Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina. And the first line is super, super famous. Happy families
00:16:13are all alike. Every happy family is unhappy in its own way. Now that's a famous line because he goes on to talk
00:16:20about all kinds of unhappy families in Anna Karenina, but it's not true as it turns out. That truth is
00:16:26the opposite, but we, it's what we perceive. The truth is that, that pretty much all unhappy families,
00:16:33they fall into certain patterns. Estrangement falls into very, very distinct patterns, but there are
00:16:38lots and lots of different ways to be happy. And that's good news, right? The whole idea that every
00:16:43happy family is alike. On the contrary, there's all kinds of family arrangements where the families are
00:16:48really happy, but the ones that aren't, the ones that are in schism, typically it falls in terms of
00:16:53a few patterns. And that's why it's important that we talk about this, but every schism feels uniquely
00:16:59miserable. And the result of the unique misery is that people are actually embarrassed by it. And they're,
00:17:04they're very unwilling to talk about it. It's kind of like an injury to something really embarrassing
00:17:09about you that's accidental and self-inflicted. And that you just don't want to talk about it. That's
00:17:14kind of how people often feel about estrangement. They feel, you know, if they're not speaking to a
00:17:19family member, it's really painful, but it also feels like, am I in the wrong? Is this self-inflicted?
00:17:25And so there's this embarrassment, this even humiliation that goes along with it. And so they don't talk
00:17:30about it. And, you know, they'll talk about it with their therapist and they'll cry about it with
00:17:34their closest friends, but, but it's not something that they ordinarily talk about very publicly.
00:17:38But it's super common. Here, two different statistics. Now, these statistics will blow
00:17:44your mind and they sound, they're, they're sort of the structurally different kinds of statistics
00:17:48because they come from different studies, but you'll get the idea of what I'm talking about here.
00:17:5211% of mothers aged 65 to 75 with at least two adult children. Okay. Imagine that. So mom is 68 years
00:18:00old. She has two grown up kids. At least 11% of these moms are estranged completely from at least one of
00:18:08them. So think about that. More than one in 10 moms of this age group, and most women aged 65 to 75
00:18:15do have adult children. More than one in 10 is not speaking to at least one of their kids. Amazing, right?
00:18:21That's way more common than I thought. And it's way more common that you'd think if you just ask
00:18:26people and talk about it in ordinary life, because it's something that people keep hidden. Higher with that.
00:18:3020% of fathers have gone through at least one period of estrangement from one of their children
00:18:37over the course of their lives. Now, again, those are different kinds of statistics because they come
00:18:41from different studies. The first study with the 11% of mothers, one of the co-authors on that from
00:18:46the Journal of Marriage and Family, which is the apex journal in this field, is once again by Carl
00:18:51Pillemer, who wrote that famous 2020 book. The second article comes also from the same journal,
00:18:56but with different authors. And that's really new. That's an article from 2023 about fathers.
00:19:00Now, the same thing is true with siblings. About 38% of American adults
00:19:05are currently, right now, estranged from at least one close family member. And that means either a
00:19:09parent, a child, a sibling, a grandparent, or a grandchild. Okay? So it goes in both directions.
00:19:14And I'm not speaking to a parent, sibling, grandparent, or grandchild. I don't know if
00:19:19it actually incorporates in-laws. That would be interesting to me to know if it incorporates in-laws.
00:19:23I would suspect that that number is higher if it incorporates in-laws, but I don't know.
00:19:28But one way or another, that's high. So, why does it happen? That's what we really want to know,
00:19:33right? And this actually comes from good research from the University of Nebraska that asks, you know,
00:19:42what are the big sources of estrangement? And it turns out that there's two big ones for why
00:19:49adult children stop talking to their aging parents. And then we'll talk about what parents feel like,
00:19:56and in point of fact, aren't talking to their adult children. And it might be different reasons.
00:20:00This is where it gets interesting. So reasons number one and two that adult children report
00:20:06not talking to their parents is number one, that their parents have so-called toxic behavior.
00:20:11And number two, that they feel unsupported. That's why they distance themselves. Okay. Now,
00:20:16now once again, a lot of this is sort of therapy speak. I would hypothesize that if you go back 75
00:20:21years and you're talking about toxic behavior, people wouldn't really know what you're talking
00:20:24about. It's obviously a metaphor because there's no physical pathogen that actually comes from the
00:20:29behavior. But that's a new kind of terminology. That's a parlance that's pretty new that actually
00:20:37comes mostly from the therapy structure that a lot of people are involved in. For better or for worse,
00:20:43you decide. And then feeling of being unsupported. Like your job is to support me. Support me through
00:20:48thick and thin, thick and thin. I have thoughts on that. And I've talked a lot about parental dynamics
00:20:53and how to take care of kids and how not to mess up your kids. And I'm thinking about it a lot. I mean,
00:20:57my kids are in the 20s and so it's a very personal issue for me. And thank God I have a super close
00:21:02relationship with all three of my adult kids and their spouses because that's awesome. And also
00:21:07because I have four grandsons and I want them crawling all over me. I want them around as much
00:21:11as they possibly can be. Because really my only job as a grandfather is jokes and wrestling. So there you
00:21:16go. But my point is that, you know, what does unsupported actually mean? There can be a lot of cases
00:21:21when parents don't feel unsupportive. They feel like they're creating an environment where their
00:21:26adult children can be responsible. And their adult children can say, no, you're just being unsupportive.
00:21:30And that leads to the number one answer when you ask parents, why do you have estrangement from
00:21:38adult child? The number one answer is, I don't know. Literally, I don't know the cause is number one,
00:21:45which suggests, by the way, that in the vast majority of the estrangement cases of adult children and their
00:21:51aging parents, it's not the parents who are saying bye-bye, it's the adult kids who are saying bye-bye.
00:21:56And I bet you suspected that all, or I bet you assumed that. I certainly did as well. But that's
00:22:02evidence that that's the fact, that, you know, the kids are saying, you're toxic. And the parents are
00:22:07like, what? What? What did I do? Which might be feigning ignorance, but you decide.
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00:23:11and you're going to like how it feels. When parents do know the reason for the schism, here's number
00:23:16two: objectionable relationships that the kids have. And number three is entitlement, is that the kid's
00:23:22entitled. So this is really interesting because you can imagine a schism happening when an adult child
00:23:28says, "I'm unsupported," and the aging parent says, "No, you're actually entitled," which is one of the
00:23:33reasons that you see in so many cases that this is over money, that, you know, and especially first
00:23:39generation money where, you know, a parent, the aging parents, they grow up with, you know, without nice
00:23:44things, as we like to say. That's a technical term. And when they kind of work for everything,
00:23:50they earn their success in a very big way. And they want their kids to as well, and their kids feel
00:23:55unsupported because, you know, the old man has got a bunch of dough, and, you know, he's not helping me,
00:23:59he's making me pay for my college, or he's making me pay for my house down payment, or whatever it
00:24:03happens to be, or he's just not generous with me. And the dad is like, "No, no, I mean, you're entitled."
00:24:10And Junior's like, "No, you're unsupportive," and it can go back and forth. So you can actually see,
00:24:14looking at exactly the same phenomenon, which is a lack of support, and one say that it's emotional
00:24:21unsupportiveness, and the other is saying it's entitledness, and, you know, who's right?
00:24:26This is the problem, is that when nobody backs down, or nobody actually will acknowledge the point
00:24:30of view of the other, you're going to stay in a state of estrangement. So this is not that this is
00:24:34always based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, you and your parents might understand
00:24:40each other plenty well, and be an estrangement. The understanding itself might be the problem.
00:24:46Now, here's an interesting part of the literature that I want to call your attention to. And this,
00:24:50once again, comes from Karl Pillemer, this great, really the world's leading expert on estrangement
00:24:55and reconciliation. It tends to be often associated with a values breach more than a behavioral
00:25:03breach. In other words, when, and especially in the case of adult kids who start living in a particular
00:25:09way, the problem isn't that they live in a way that's objectionable to the parents. The problem is
00:25:14that in so doing, they will overtly reject the values of the parents. The classic case is, you know,
00:25:21a young adult comes home from college and says, you know, all these values that you brought me up with,
00:25:25mom and dad, they're really, really bad and stupid and evil and awful. And so, therefore, that's really
00:25:30stupid and you need to... It's like, "I'm back from state university technical institution and I'm gonna
00:25:39school you guys, mom and dad." I mean, the classic, right? I mean, we see all these... It's a movie
00:25:44theme. It's a meme, practically. And there but for the grace of God, go any of us, where we suddenly get
00:25:49super smart when we move out and we're under the sway of a lot of other adults. Right or wrong, you decide,
00:25:54right? But the whole point is this from this research. If you, as a young adult or not so young
00:26:01adult, choose to live differently than your parents, that's almost certainly not going to create schism.
00:26:08If you reject the values of your aging parents, it will. Very important distinction. I want to
00:26:14underline this. Let me say it again. Live the way you want, but don't reject the values of your parents
00:26:21unless you're willing to risk a schism. Because what that's saying is,
00:26:25"I hate you. You brought me up in a particular way that was completely wrong. I reject that."
00:26:30Now, it's not a rejection to live in a different way, really. And the research is pretty clear that
00:26:37aging parents, they can get used to a lot of stuff. The whole idea that if you come home and you're
00:26:42living in a different way, they're going to toss you out and you're dead to me, you're no son of mine,
00:26:47or, you know, whatever, that happens very rarely. But sitting around the, you know, the Thanksgiving
00:26:53table saying, you know, you're just really vile and stupid in the way that you think, that's going
00:26:57to create some scar tissue. That's going to create some real damage. So that's a pretty interesting
00:27:02piece of information that goes along as well. Now, let's get back to this whole idea of parents, aging parents,
00:27:10having a schism because of an adult child's so-called objectionable relationships. You're probably
00:27:18thinking about friends or a romantic partner. And that can most certainly be the case, that you are
00:27:23hanging out with the wrong crowd as far as your parents are concerned. You might not think so. As
00:27:27a matter of fact, you don't think so, but they might. And that objectionable relationship might lead to
00:27:30this problem. But probably not if it's just a change of behavior, because I mentioned that just a second ago.
00:27:36One objectionable relationship that's more common than you think is the very person or people that
00:27:44might be encouraging you to go no contact with your parents. And that's a whole movement today.
00:27:51Going back in time a little bit, not that long ago, if you would tell me that there are non-profit
00:27:55organizations dedicated to no contact with parents, I would say, "That's insane. Why would you have a
00:28:00non-profit organization dedicated to hurting people, dedicating to ripping families apart?" Okay,
00:28:06it's not that simple, right? It's not that simple. There might be non-profit organizations dedicated
00:28:11to helping people understand when they've been victims of abuse, for example, when it's actually
00:28:15unhealthy, even dangerous to be around certain family members. I get that. But the problem with that is
00:28:22that the boundaries can be kind of fuzzy on this. And there is substantial evidence, I think quite
00:28:30credible, that the no contact movement, which is pretty organized at this point, that's encouraging
00:28:36people to pull away from their families, to leave their parents behind, has gone from what we would
00:28:44typically think of as abuse and gone into realms that are a lot more, well, let's just say questionable,
00:28:50such as when people disagree with each other, when we get into ideological disagreement, when we spar
00:28:57over politics. So once again, abuse, no joke. I mean, real abuse, don't get me wrong. You have to stay
00:29:04safe is what it comes down to. But what about when we actually get into something that constitutes abuse
00:29:10in the minds of some, but very much in the minds of other people? I am personally of the view that
00:29:16political differences are not abuse. They're just not. You know, I get it. I mean, people disagree
00:29:21passionately. This is America. I mean, some of you are not in America, sorry. And this is what it
00:29:28means to live in a free society, is to be able to disagree with each other. But I wrote a whole book
00:29:34called Love Your Enemies. I just quoted Matthew 5:44 from the Sermon on the Mount. Love your
00:29:39enemies. Pray for those who persecute you, even if they're in the next bedroom, if you're ideological
00:29:44foes. Love is really important across differences, big differences, to be sure. I'm not just of the
00:29:50sticks and stones school. I actually think that a free society requires that we be able to cohabitate,
00:29:57that we be able to coexist with people who disagree with us. And in point of fact, people who disagree
00:30:01with us make us stronger and better, because this is the competition of ideas. We have to have the
00:30:06resilience, the personal strength to be able to put up with ideas that are not the same as ours,
00:30:12if for no other reason than to understand them and to be able to maintain love relationships
00:30:17in spite of them. And many advocates in the No Contact movement suggest it's appropriate to cut off
00:30:22family members simply for voting in a particular way. I've seen cases again and again and again. As
00:30:27a matter of fact, I will throw into the notes an article from New York Magazine titled,
00:30:34"It's okay to go no contact with your MAGA relatives."
00:30:40This is of a piece with the opportunism of many political leaders today, on the right and the left.
00:30:47I'm not making a partisan point here, friends, who encouraged that cutting off familial contact
00:30:52is a means to fire up voters in a highly politicized political environment. As a matter of fact, in 2023,
00:30:59there was a...one of the presidential campaigns released a message on social media,
00:31:05a handy guide to responding to your crazy relatives and their nonsense this Thanksgiving. It was a high...I'm
00:31:11not even going to tell you which side it was because it could have been either, right? You know how hijacked
00:31:16we've become by the 5% fringes. But here's the point. When you have estrangement, it hurts you,
00:31:21is what it comes down to. It might profit somebody else. You know, somebody else is getting your vote,
00:31:27somebody else, some activist is getting your support. Is it in your interest? It's just something that
00:31:32you have to think about. Let's go back to the research a little bit. Then I'm going to come back to
00:31:36what to do about it. I'll get off my high horse here and let's get back to the research on this about
00:31:41what is likely going to happen. If you are on either side of estrangement, you decided to pull away
00:31:46or you've been pulled away from. If you're the aging parent, if you're the adult child,
00:31:52if you're in a no contact situation, you might be wondering what's the ultimate outcome likely going
00:31:57to be. And we got the data on that because we always have the data on everything, don't we?
00:32:00The data are actually incredibly encouraging. I love that. Here's the research. It shows that 81% of
00:32:08estranged adult children eventually become unsegregated, unestranged from their mothers.
00:32:1481%. That's great, isn't it? This comes from that. Once again, the Journal of Marriage and Family is
00:32:18such a great journal. From an article from 2023, relatively recent, 81% of estrangements resolve
00:32:25between adult children and their mothers and their aging mothers. They're poor aging mothers. How about
00:32:31fathers? 69%. Now, why? Why is it so much more likely that there's going to be reconciliation between
00:32:37mothers and their children versus fathers and their children? And there are two answers to this.
00:32:42Number one is because estrangement with fathers typically goes back to dad leaving when they were kids.
00:32:48And there are a lot of families where dad bailed. And so the estrangement occurs because, you know,
00:32:53who's talked to dad and who knows? 15, 20, 30 years. Maybe dad left the picture. I have a very,
00:32:59very close friend where dad left when, you know, my friend was a kid. And he started another family
00:33:05someplace and nobody ever heard from him again. That's sort of old school in this way. It's kind of easy to
00:33:09find people these days. If you're an internet sleuth, you can typically find people. It's hard to stay under
00:33:14the radar. But the truth is maybe you don't want to because, you know, somebody was not part of your
00:33:18life. And that's one reason because dad is more likely to be absent than mom. The other reason is
00:33:22because dad tends to die earlier. And so you have fewer chances to reconcile when, when, when, when male
00:33:28mortality is different than female mortality. Men tend to die, depending on the socioeconomic class that
00:33:35you're talking about, somewhere between two and eight years earlier than women. And, and so the result is
00:33:40that a lot of, um, reconciliation is missed as a result of that and could have happened if, if men
00:33:45had actually lived longer. But the bottom line is if you're in the situation on either side, most likely
00:33:50it's going to work out. And that does not mean that there's going to be no disagreements, that they'll
00:33:55cease and the differences will disappear. I know zero conflict-free families, including my own. We have
00:34:02lots and lots of arguments. My kids argue with each other. Um, they, we argue with our kids. They argue with us.
00:34:09I very frequently don't vote the same way as my kids. I very frequently don't vote the same way as my
00:34:14wife, as a matter of fact. There have been times when I'm the only one in my whole family who voted
00:34:20in a particular way. They all, they're all, cause they're all so wrong sometimes. What can I tell you?
00:34:23The truth is that you got disagreements. The point is not, not disagreeing. The point is how do you
00:34:30disagree and what do you do when you disagree is actually what it comes down to. What this means is that
00:34:36families that are reconciled or families that have never faced estrangement in the first place,
00:34:40if they're close at all, and they have disagreements that are common inside families,
00:34:45that they've figured out how to get beyond schismatic disparities and love each other in spite of that.
00:34:51And that gets me to the two magic ingredients in the literature that you find of families that stay
00:34:56together, despite the fact that sometimes they can't stand each other's choices or what they say.
00:35:00They do two things. And again, this is going to go back to the oldest ideas in the world.
00:35:06They tolerate disagreement. They don't love it necessarily, but they have a high, high, high
00:35:11degree of tolerance. And they know how to forgive each other is what it comes down to. Now, I want to
00:35:16talk about that a little bit because sometimes, I mean, you'd expect in kin-based groups based on
00:35:21evolutionary biology, that tolerance would be higher, but sometimes it isn't in our modern society.
00:35:27And in a lot of ways, it's easier to be intolerant to people around you because you hold them to a
00:35:32higher standard. It's like, how dare my wife vote differently than me, said lots and lots of people
00:35:37in America in the last presidential election, right? Whereas, you know, the next door neighbor would
00:35:42be like, yeah, he's, you know, a little nutty, voted differently than me. Good guy. Good guy. Yeah.
00:35:46Yeah. So I'm using his lawnmower right now, right? I mean, the whole point is that you're less
00:35:51tolerant for the people for whom you should be more tolerant. And you're less forgiving because it feels
00:35:57like a personal affront a lot more than a disagreement would be. Even a substantial
00:36:02disagreement or perhaps especially a substantial agreement would be with somebody with whom you're,
00:36:08you're not a blood relation. You know, the stakes feel lower is the way that this actually works out.
00:36:14So what do I mean by tolerance? You know, it's funny that coexist bumper sticker that you actually see
00:36:20that has, you know, for all the letters and the words coexist and in the word coexist, they have,
00:36:25you know, they're turned into symbols from different religions. And, you know, I love that. I do.
00:36:30I mean, it's like, I confess, I'm just, you know, I'm an old hippie in my heart. And anybody who's
00:36:37a serious fan of the show or has followed my work, you know that I spent a lot of time studying other
00:36:43religions despite the fact that I'm a devoted Catholic. I love people who think in different ways,
00:36:48philosophically, spiritually. I just learned so much from other people, especially when their beliefs are based on love itself.
00:36:55It's fantastic. But it's very easy to not include people who think differently on some ideological or
00:37:01political things in that bumper sticker. And there's got to be a way to put mom
00:37:05in that coexist bumper sticker. There's got to be a way to, to have your families in that. You just,
00:37:10I mean, it's like, yeah, we're going to coexist. We're going to, we're going to walk into the future
00:37:13together. You're going to be at, I'm, one of us is going to be each other's funeral. I'm going to cry
00:37:17when you die or vice versa. That's the way it's going to go. And we're going to laugh at the reception
00:37:21after the funeral about how much we disagreed on politics. That kind of tolerance and coexistence
00:37:25is one that's fundamentally based on the idea that we're in it for life, is what it comes down to.
00:37:30And that's the attitude that families that stick together have, which is, this is it. We're stuck
00:37:34together. We're stuck together. That's the essence of coexistence. And that's kind of a beautiful
00:37:39stickiness, if you know what I mean. The second is forgiveness and forgiveness can be really,
00:37:44really super hard because the injuries and slights are so important. It's funny. And I talk to couples
00:37:49a lot and, and, and Esther and I are, you know, we're doing a lot of work with couples. Now we, you
00:37:55know, we counsel couples on their way to getting married, you know, marriage prep in, in a Catholic
00:38:00context, we're doing secular retreats now on, on how to fall in love and stay in love. And it's really
00:38:05important, but we know we've been married for almost 35 years. This is, this is our 35th wedding
00:38:09anniversary. And sometimes it's much, much harder to forgive the person who's closest to you because
00:38:14the slights are so, when your batteries are wired together, when you've got, when you're, when your
00:38:19love, when there's the, the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brain, which feels like an
00:38:24antenna to the divine, it's a delicate system that can be disturbed so easily. This is what families do.
00:38:30And so little slights get, you know, blown up into bigger things. And it's very important to have the
00:38:35same standard of forgiveness that you'd have for anybody. It's like, it's okay.
00:38:39It's okay. I will do a show on how to forgive on actually how to do that because there's a whole
00:38:44algorithm. There's a whole set of techniques on how to forgive other people. But the whole point is
00:38:50forgiveness is not least important. It's most important for the people who are in your kin,
00:38:55because it's hardest for most people to actually do that. And to have a, a culture, an overt culture,
00:39:01which many, many cohesive families have, which is, I promise you, I'm going to forgive you when you
00:39:06inevitably insult me, when you inevitably hurt my feelings. And you promise to do the same thing as
00:39:11well and bring it and holding people to those overt promises. Making it just implicit is really not
00:39:17good enough.
00:39:18Now, one last thing before we go to some, some questions, because we got some interesting
00:39:21questions today. One more thing to consider in our, in our current political and social
00:39:25environment. We are the product, my friends. And I've talked about this a lot on this show
00:39:30on how we've been productized by tech. Tech has productized us and, and making us addicted as we
00:39:35are to our devices. And so I've talked a lot about how to, not to get rid of our devices, but to manage
00:39:40them. So we use them for learning and loving and laughing and, and really good things and not,
00:39:45you know, the scrolling and hyp, hypnosis and distraction and all the things that actually hurt
00:39:49us. And when we do the latter, we're being productized. We just are, because somebody's
00:39:54making money from us. But the truth is, ideologically, we're being productized as well.
00:39:59When you hate somebody that you actually should love, somebody's probably profiting. And not always,
00:40:06but a lot of times they are. And, and I know someone who isn't, and it's you. And again,
00:40:10I'm, I'm ruling out the cases of overt abuse and you have to decide what abuse actually is.
00:40:16But in cases where you're told it is, and you're not quite sure, this is where we need
00:40:20to do a little bit of work. There might be influencers, politicians, media telling you to
00:40:28ditch your family members because they have mistaken values, bad ideas, or really vile politics.
00:40:36And in, and having those views that they don't love or, or care about you, but that's wrong.
00:40:40The ones who don't love and care about you are the people encouraging you to pull away from your
00:40:45family. This is especially in the case of political activism. And there's a lot of research on this.
00:40:50And I've talked about dark triad personalities and how they, they're so common in political activism
00:40:56today on both the political right and left. They use your misery to further their interests.
00:41:02People who don't know you, for example, they might make a case for cutting off your parents
00:41:06or your siblings or your kids. And it might sound appealing to you right now, but doing so
00:41:12is very likely to be a recipe for your loneliness and your depression and not a better world for all.
00:41:18And that's what we want is a better world for all. Maybe, just maybe, the people with whom you should
00:41:23have no contact are the people who are encouraging you to go no contact. Let's do some questions.
00:41:29First one is from anonymous, writing in the office hours at arthurbricks.com.
00:41:34I've always made the effort in friendships, not only because I would like to receive it back,
00:41:38but also because I believe this is what people are supposed to do as a good friend.
00:41:42Make an effort in friendship. Yeah, for sure. However, I hardly find any person who matches my
00:41:48effort. As a result of this, I feel lonely and drained. What do you suggest that I do? Well,
00:41:53okay, let's look at the facts. Most people are slackers when it comes to friendship. Most people are not
00:41:58really that great at friendship. And part of the reason is because they're busy, is what it comes
00:42:02down to. And when you do the work, most people will let you do the work. Look, every time you go out to
00:42:07lunch with your friends and you pay, they'll pretty much let you do that. That's just kind of how people
00:42:12are. So here's the first question. When you do the work, who appreciates it and who doesn't?
00:42:17If you have a one-sided relationship that's truly emotionally one-sided, you're going to know.
00:42:22You have a good sense of intuition. We have a million ways in our reptilian brain for sensing the
00:42:27social milieu to know whether or not it's all you and not them or whether they don't appreciate it,
00:42:32where you're approaching and they're avoiding. So when you approach and they avoid, what that means
00:42:38is that you're kind of, you're forcing a friendship issue where it actually is not what they want.
00:42:43That's what it comes down to. Assess that. Think about your friendships and where that's the case.
00:42:47In many of the cases, what you'll find is that somebody's just letting you do the work. And if
00:42:51these are real friends, not deal friends, not virtual friends, real friends, here's what you do.
00:42:56You go to that person and they say, "I would really like it if you called more. I would really like
00:43:01it if you actually initiated a little bit more, if you texted a little bit more." I've seen people
00:43:05do this all the time and they're like, "Huh, really? Totally. I'm happy to do that." If somebody's
00:43:11offended by that or somebody blows that off, you knew they were in category one. But if they basically
00:43:17say, "Yeah, I'll do that because I like hanging out with you," then they're in category two. And what are
00:43:21friends supposed to do? They're supposed to be open with each other. They're supposed to talk to each other,
00:43:24frankly. They shouldn't be worried about something as trivial as saying, "I wish you'd call me more."
00:43:30I mean, that's great. With my closest friends that they say, "I wish you'd call me more," I want
00:43:33to hear that because I love them. So that's what to do. Second, this comes from Summer Platt,
00:43:39writing in once again to the website. "Do you know anything about attachment styles, anxious and avoidant,
00:43:44and how that plays into finding a partner? Oh, do I? Oh, yes, I do know about that. I've done a
00:43:50lot of work on that. I teach that every year to my graduate students in Leadership and Happiness."
00:43:55Here's how to think about attachment styles in finding a partner. And by that, I don't mean like a
00:44:00partner if you're a dentist and you want to set up a dental practice. I mean like your romantic partner.
00:44:05There are two pathologies in romantic partnership. They're called anxiousness or anxiety and avoidance.
00:44:14So two things that can really mess up your partnership or mess up your ability to find
00:44:18a partner is that you're over-anxious about your romantic life or you're avoidant of actually making
00:44:24commitment or even getting together in the first place. And this leads to kind of a two-by-two diagram
00:44:30that I want you to imagine here right in front of you. There are people who are both anxious and avoidant.
00:44:35They're really anxious about relationships and so they avoid them because they're so impossible.
00:44:39That's called the fearful pattern. And these people, they tend to stay pretty much stay single
00:44:44and you have to work on both dimensions, okay? The second is people who are both anxious but
00:44:50non-avoidant. They're really, really freaked out, but they're not avoidant. They're actually looking.
00:44:54This is a little bit better, but it really leads to a lot of worry and a lot of hardship
00:45:00emotionally. That's called preoccupied partnering. There are people who are not anxious, but they're
00:45:04really avoidant. They're dismissing is what that's called. Those are people like, "I don't got time.
00:45:07I don't care. I don't even have time for this." They tend to stay single a long time as well. And
00:45:11then there are people who are not anxious and not avoidant and that's secure partnering. And that's
00:45:15where you want to be. That's where I am in my marriage, which after 35 years, you'd think so,
00:45:21right? And by the way, I've moved from other quadrants to that, as has my wife. My wife was always less
00:45:26anxious and always less avoidant, but I was kind of in the fearful, kind of anxious, kind of avoidant
00:45:31quadrant when I was in my early twenties. And then I fell in love and I met somebody who really completed
00:45:36me. And I've talked about that. I've talked about that quite a bit in both my writing and my podcast,
00:45:41and that led me to be secure. And that's what you actually get from love that's healthy and in a
00:45:46healthy way. You can look in my writing and look on my website for a test to find out where you are
00:45:52on this two by two diagram that'll actually help you because then you'll know what to deal with.
00:45:56I'll do a whole show on that. Okay. Let's just say that I'll do a whole show on that at some point,
00:46:00but that's a good way to get started. Andrew Kern writes in once again to the website. "I am 41 of
00:46:05a single. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm doing the work for you here, Andrew. I'm telling you
00:46:10where you live so that people can find you. Are there any practical ways that you can advise on putting
00:46:15myself out there to meet women locally?" Okay. It's pretty clear what Andrew's after. Good for you,
00:46:20Andrew. You're playing heads up. "How to meet women locally instead of on the apps in the hopes of
00:46:26marriage as the ultimate goal." Man, this is really good. This is good stuff, man. The answer to this,
00:46:31yes, is that you will find that people who meet in person around particular wholesome interests are the
00:46:40people who are most likely to be in the market for long-term relationships. And so that's the
00:46:44place to actually go. Now, for a lot of people, it's interests like a running club, a book club,
00:46:50volunteering at the local animal shelter, whatever it happens to be. But that's where you're most likely
00:46:55to meet somebody who's also there because of their interest in doing something wholesome and good.
00:46:59But they're also, and there's good research on this, that shows that they're most likely to have
00:47:04light personality traits, which are conscientiousness and agreeableness. People who meet in other
00:47:09places like bars and nightclubs and, believe it or not, on beaches, they tend to have darker personality
00:47:14traits and they tend to be more interested in short-term mating. That's not what you want,
00:47:19Andrew. You even said that in your note. The other place is religious occasions or religious interests.
00:47:25And again, I don't know if you're religious or not, Andrew, but if you are, that's the place to look.
00:47:30In almost every city, there will be one congregation, no matter what your religion is, that caters
00:47:35mostly to young singles and people are there for it. And people often say, "Yeah, but I'm not really
00:47:40religious." That's not what I asked. I mean, the truth is that you might get more so, especially if
00:47:46you meet somebody who has a religion that you're not ruling out or that you were raised in and haven't
00:47:51practiced in a long time. And this might be an opportunity for you actually to go back and say,
00:47:58"Maybe. I'm open to persuasion." Let's just put it that way. And that can be a very beautiful way to
00:48:04meet people. Also, by the way, for those of you who are on the apps, the apps are not terrible
00:48:09necessarily, but the whole point is don't stay virtual. Get out onto a date as soon as you can,
00:48:15because you have a million ways to discern the character and beliefs and characteristics of a
00:48:19person in person that you don't online. So therefore, you're less likely to make a mistake the sooner you
00:48:25get out into real life, which is what some of the better apps are actually encouraging.
00:48:29There you go. So good luck, Andrew. Let me know how it goes. We're done.
00:48:32Let me know your thoughts by writing into the website, officehours@arthurbricks.com.
00:48:36Like and subscribe. Hit the subscribe button, please, on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple.
00:48:40Leave a comment. I'll read it. Even if it's negative, I want to know because I want to know what you want
00:48:46more of. Follow me on socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms. Remember,
00:48:51you can actually have all kinds of enrichment that comes from these things as long as you're getting
00:48:55content that's good for you and that you're learning from. And do order the meaning of your life to learn
00:49:00more about all the things I've talked about here today. And if you like it, maybe that's a good gift
00:49:06for your best friend's next birthday or a family member. Family member you're trying to become
00:49:11reconciled with. I don't know. I'm making it up at this point. Have a great week.
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