What Family Estrangement is Trying to Teach You

Episode Transcript

Opening

Debra: Hello, welcome to another episode of Jung on Purpose. I am Debra Maldonado.

Dr. Rob: And Dr. Rob, welcome to the program.

Debra: We’re excited to continue our talk about family and early childhood. Today we are talking about estrangement. Do you have a no-contact experience with a family member, or do you know someone who does? According to the research, it’s actually very common. We’ll go into the stats, we’ll go into why it happens, what it is, and what you can do about it, and how you can be empowered in that situation.

And before we begin, I do want to ask you to subscribe to our channel. If you’re watching us on YouTube, there’s a button in the corner you can click. And if you’re listening to us on the podcast services, please don’t forget to subscribe to get every episode of Jung on Purpose.

The Numbers Behind Estrangement

Dr. Rob: Yeah, we definitely appreciate your attention. There’s an amazing stat that I came across: twenty-seven percent of US adults have had some kind of experience with estrangement from a family member. Now, what does that mean? Twenty-seven percent sounds like a relatively low number, but if we translate it into actual numbers, that’s sixty-seven million people in the US alone. You can imagine what that looks like worldwide.

Debra: Which is why the topic has always been so popular. There are so many people affected by it.

Dr. Rob: And of course there are a lot of factors that go into it. We’re just presenting our perspective, our approach, especially as family field practitioners.

Debra: And we’re talking about any family member. It could be a parent, a sibling, a grandmother, a stepmother. With that twenty-seven percent, can you clarify: does estrangement necessarily mean no contact? Or does it mean you’re sort of in their life but not really involved? Or is it completely no contact?

Dr. Rob: The research shows these patterns are on and off. They don’t happen just once and then it’s done, the end of the story. There’s usually a reconciliation. But estrangement does mean there’s a kind of rupture, a separation in the relationship. There might be little contact, or no contact at all.

Why Estrangement Happens

Debra: It could be that you marry the wrong person. Or even younger, as a teenager, you could run away and go live in a band when your conservative, very religious parents are the thing you’re escaping. It could be because of religion. It could be because of the parents’ treatment of the child, or the child’s inability to accept the parents’ love. So it’s not always just about the parent.

I know Oprah had a popular special recently about no-contact. They interviewed the parents, the children, the psychologists, and it was interesting to see their take on what the child was going through. But no one really talked about the inner work of the self, it was more about how do I process the grief. I think we can offer something a little more than that.

Dr. Rob: I’d say Oprah’s view is a sociological perspective, they’re looking at social problems from that lens. Because we look at depth psychology, it’s a completely different approach, as I hope you’ll see. There are some stats on what you were talking about: approximately ten percent are estranged from a parent or child specifically.

Debra: And how would the therapists typically look at it?

Dr. Rob: That ten percent is the parent-child dynamic specifically, but it’s still about twenty-five million people. That’s a lot. Eighty-five percent are estranged for approximately a year, but fifty percent of those are estranged for four years or more. Significant numbers.

Debra: And some people don’t reconcile until the deathbed. I have so many clients I’ve worked with over the years who were estranged from a father or mother, and on the deathbed, all of a sudden they say everything they were waiting their whole life to say. And the parent, because they’re dying, says all the things they wanted to say. It’s such a tragedy that it has to wait until that last moment.

Dr. Rob: Yes. There’s also a pretty good understanding of the causes, and again they’re varied and complex, but it breaks down into things like money, inheritance disputes.

Debra: Being cut out of the will.

Dr. Rob: In-law conflict, the family you marry into has to interact with your nuclear family, and drama ensues. Often it’s the spouse versus the family of origin, your mother doesn’t get along with your wife, or vice versa.

There are a lot of cultural drivers too. In our culture, especially in the US, there’s a rising individualism, which is not the same as the individuation we talk about. Individualism is the idea that you have to go at it alone, that you don’t need others, that you should separate from the family that raised you. There’s an emphasis on personal happiness, the pursuit of happiness. You don’t stay in your hometown, you go pursue your happiness in New York, and you lose contact with family.

Debra: What about cults? We hear stories about Scientology and other strange cults where they tell you to cut off from your family because they want to control you. Did that come into play in the research? I’d think that would be a bigger part of it, the cults encouraging you to cut ties because you’re now in this spiritual circle, not the spiritual sense we mean, but whatever that cult is driving toward, separating you from the people who are awake and outside the bubble, so you don’t leave the tribe.

Dr. Rob: I’d say that’s an offshoot of religion, because many times it’s religion that divides people. Let’s say you marry into a Catholic family and you’re Jewish, Muslim, or an atheist, that can drive a wedge between people. Not necessarily, of course, sometimes it brings people together. I know people who convert to fit into the family they’re marrying into.

Debra: What’s interesting is if twenty-seven percent are estranged, seventy-three percent are not. With all the diversity we have in marriage, culture, and religion, the majority of us really make it work. I wonder, some families are truly happily blended, and others just tolerate each other. It depends.

But it’s interesting that we, as human beings, can get together across culture and across families and be so diverse within our own family field, and still get along. So let’s talk about the internal family, the nuclear family, as we used to say. There’s this field, this family field, we talk about in our Archetypal Family Field methodology, this kind of unconscious field that constellates the family together, where we share ideas, rules, and agreements with each other.

A Coaching Model for Depth Work

Dr. Rob: That’s a whole different perspective, because we understand now, from depth psychology, which grew out of Jung’s work, and in our approach, I’d say we’re really among the first to create a family model based on depth psychology, but in a coaching model. There are probably other schools of thought that include that, but they’re more therapeutic models, you have to go to a therapist or an analyst to do that kind of work. In a coaching model, people can approach this work in a non-clinical, non-stigmatizing way.

Debra: Where you’re not labeling family members with personality disorders and self-diagnosing yourself or others. I think what’s happening is that with the internet, and it keeps growing with social media, there’s a lot of armchair advice online from people who aren’t really experts. There are real experts too, but people are self-diagnosing and villainizing the parents based on a video or a book they read. “This family member must be this label or that label,” the narcissistic mother, the narcissistic father.

Dr. Rob: When I heard about that kind of labeling, I’d done a lot of formal diagnosing through psychological testing. We would never make a diagnosis, especially of something as serious as narcissism, simply based on external behavior. The testing was the key, you’d actually administer intricate psychological tests, accumulate a whole slew of results, and then use clinical judgment to make a diagnosis. Whereas people are flippantly pointing fingers and saying, “that’s a narcissistic person.” That’s not a good idea, even at a basic humanistic level. We don’t want to treat each other as human beings that way.

Debra: And then they can only be that. Here’s what happens with a label, I see this all the time, I read these for curiosity and the algorithm keeps feeding them to me. There’s a slideshow of “these are the traits your parent has if they may be a narcissist,” they don’t share love with you, they don’t acknowledge you, they put you down, they criticize you. And there are some more serious things too. But just because your parent criticizes you, or doesn’t notice you, doesn’t mean they’re a narcissist, they could just be preoccupied. There could be a million reasons. Once you give someone a label, they cannot be anyone else. Your mind starts to formulate and only notice the negativity around that parent, the bad thing, and it reinforces the label.

Dr. Rob: That’s it.

Debra: And then you’re not able to see any other part of that parent, which could drive the estrangement further.

Dr. Rob: Yes.

The Archetypal Family Field

Dr. Rob: So back to the Archetypal Family Field: the understanding is that it’s a field of consciousness we inherit in our family system. As we’re growing up in this unit, the family operates as one organism. And like any organism, it’s always looking for homeostasis, for balance. It finds a way to balance itself out through each member playing a certain role, bringing in elements the family needs. One child might be the hero who goes out and carries on the family business or creates new ones. Another might be the slacker, the trickster, the invisible child.

These roles are not archetypes themselves, they arise from deeper layers of the psyche that we call archetypes. The archetypes themselves are invisible, we cannot see them. A lot of people in pop culture make the mistake of calling the role an individual is playing the archetype. But these are not archetypes, because an archetype contains its opposite.

Debra: The rebel.

Dr. Rob: Somebody could be the hero in a creative way, or the anti-hero, and it’s coming from the same archetype.

Debra: I love that, that’s actually the simplest way I’ve heard it explained, because I’ve been trying to find the words for the difference between the role and the archetype. The archetype contains all the dark and light, and the role is the personal expression of that archetype in a very specific way, related to a person’s conditioning, their tendencies, their genetic predispositions, all of those things.

Dr. Rob: That’s right. And here’s the really important element of the Archetypal Family Field: it’s internalized. The whole mental structure is internalized in the individual. So even if you run away, even if you say “my parents were narcissistic and I’m not going to have any contact with them,” you’re carrying those elements in your own mind. Wherever you go, you’re going to have to deal with them, because they’ll show up in your external life.

Debra: What usually happens, and we see this all the time, is that those traits show up whether the person is a stranger or not, they show up as bosses, they show up in society. You’re triggered by people who carry those traits, and you’re constantly fighting the world in a way because of that initial fight, and you don’t know why. Why does this irritate me? Why do I keep meeting these people? If you’re feeling like the victim, like everyone is taking advantage of you all the time and you have to be careful, it unconsciously brings you into situations that reflect and reinforce that role. So you could take the role of victim, and then your personality starts to constellate around that archetype. The projection of a label onto a parent means they can’t be anyone else, but when you identify with the label yourself, you can’t be anyone else either.

Dr. Rob: Yeah.

Debra: Because it would disrupt the ego, it would disrupt the identity that the ego ties itself to for survival.

Dr. Rob: Absolutely.

Debra: And we want to be free, right? We want to break free of the patterns and identities we fall into. “I don’t want to be a victim anymore.” But we tend to keep going, and we start telling ourselves the story that this is just the way things are, that nothing works out for me. That’s a real tragedy, because there is a way out.

Dr. Rob: Yes. And the psychological principle to understand, which is easily understood, is that an internal conflict becomes an external conflict. Whatever conflict you carry or acquire, the things that constellate in your psyche as you’re growing up, become internalized. Those internal conflicts, whether they’re within you or whether they appeared in the family but you internalized them, will then be expressed throughout your life. This is the importance of the inner work, realizing first that it is internal, that you’re not only dealing with individuals you left behind or are still relating to at the family level. Many people tell us, “my relationship with my mother was strained when I was a child, but now we’re okay, we’re best friends.” Well, that doesn’t matter. The early experience is what was internalized, so the conflict is still within you regardless of your current relationship with that parent.

Debra: We see that a lot with our clients. They say, “I had a tough relationship with my father, but now we get along great.” And that usually happens because parents, when they raise you, are in their twenties, maybe early thirties. We talk about the emotionally immature parent, people have kids when they’re emotionally immature. We don’t actually reach maturity as adults until we’re in our thirties. So it’s not a pathology, it’s what parents at that age are, very young and not fully developed yet either. Naturally, they’re going to mature and have better responses over time.

But what you’re saying is, yes, that’s fine, but all the stuff you assumed about them when you were younger is still in you, even though consciously you’re having a great relationship now. It doesn’t go anywhere. Those patterns need to find a place to express themselves, so they’ll keep getting expressed. And the reason isn’t that our unconscious is trying to be cruel to us, it’s trying to make us aware of it so we can deal with it. I think the biggest difference with our work, compared to some other approaches, is that we don’t want to clear these things out. We want to open them up. We want to move toward them. We don’t just want to get rid of our patterns with a tapping technique or some magical cure, we want to look at them, because inside of that is gold, and it’s going to help us have true power in our life. Like you said last time, the ocean is what carries us to the next phase of our life.

Dr. Rob: Yeah. And this is a salient point: it impacts the way we do relationships as adults. It impacts the kind of work and meaning we find, or the lack of meaning, and the kind of money or financial situations we end up attracting into our lives, because all of those things are learned very early on. They have to do with the narrative we carry into life about who we are and what’s possible for us in the world.

Why the Rupture Often Starts Much Earlier

Debra: One of the things we wanted to talk about is that we usually estrange from our parents after we’re past nine years old, because we can’t leave our parents at nine and go off into the world. Maybe there are exceptions, like Tom Sawyer, but let’s think about what happens later in life. It doesn’t just happen as adults, where we think, “we went to that family barbecue and mom did it again, and I’m done, I’m not going to talk to her again, she embarrassed me in front of everyone,” or there’s addiction interfering with the relationship and you’re just done. What we were saying before is that the family field formed when we’re younger, those ruptures start happening very, very young. We may not be able to see them yet, but the rupture happens early on. Sometimes adulthood is just when it hits an apex, where it abruptly ends the relationship.

Dr. Rob: Yeah, usually, just like at the individual level, the thing is not the thing. The issue the individual thinks is the cause of the rupture isn’t actually it. These family patterns have been decades in the making, and they even transcend the individual family, going into cross-generational patterns. It’s interesting, when you start to open up the unconscious mind, how much you start to uncover. And like you say, we’re not trying to clear this, and we’re not rejecting our family system. On the contrary, it’s a way to really step into its power and the lessons it holds for us. All that unconscious content is really able to feed us, to nourish us in a new way. It’s almost like the transformation requires those elements in the unconscious in order to transform itself into real life.

This Isn’t About Trauma, It’s About Self-Discovery

Debra: We’re talking about high-functioning people who aren’t dealing with any serious issues with the family. Sometimes it’s just a parent being cold, or busy at work, or having a lot of kids and not paying enough attention to one, or a child dies and one becomes the golden child, and the family is never the same after that.

As a coach in the AFF system, the Archetypal Family Field system, we look at it differently from trauma treatment, that’s separate from this. This is really self-discovery. It’s for people with a strong sense of self, a strong ego, who are functioning in the world, and I think that’s most people, I think it’s about ninety percent of people who are really high-functioning. It’s about going to the next level. If you’re estranged from a parent, that rupture disrupted the family field, and we’re carrying it within us. Just separating yourself and going no-contact with that person isn’t going to fully resolve it, it may help with your conscious environment, you’re changing the environment. But we also need to go inside and look at what assumptions we’re making, what our projections are, how we’re seeing the world. We can use that experience to understand ourselves better, and to understand what role we played in that field, and how we want to break free of our role. If you carry the role of victim, do you want to be free of that, versus carrying that as your story, “I just left my parents and that parent is terrible and that’s my life and that defines me?” What if we could be free of that field, free of that story, and regardless of whether or not we reconcile, become empowered, so that whatever happened with that parent doesn’t become the defining narrative of our life, and we can be free?

Dr. Rob: Yeah, the research indicates that many who cut off contact still long for relationship. It’s a natural part of ourselves to always want to connect to family, it’s still there despite the anger or the rupture. Repair usually starts with a parent, the parent might reach out with a phone call or a letter and say, “let’s try to reconcile, let’s make some contact.” But it has to include respect for the adult child’s independence. If there’s a lack of respect, it’s difficult to mend the relationship. Through respect, through putting things aside and agreeing to disagree, and politics has played a big role in a lot of family divisions nowadays too, saying “okay, you have your beliefs, I have my beliefs, but let’s try to get along for the sake of the family.”

Closing Thoughts

Debra: We have so much to cover, so I’m thinking we should do a second episode on this, because I want to talk about the process of how you look inward and how we work with these archetypal roles. But I want to leave you with this: even if it’s a terrible situation, leaving your family doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life.

You can actually use that information and that experience for your growth. So nothing is lost. A lot of people think, “I’m forever damaged from that experience, I’m going to carry that the rest of my life.” But what if we can transmute that energy, that experience, into something that empowers you? A lot of our coaches and people I know turn that into wanting to help others who had the same problem, and it becomes their purpose in life. So nothing is wasted.

Dr. Rob: Yeah, absolutely. And even separation is sometimes healthy, and required, and often temporary. People need their space and time to do their inner work, to individuate, not individualize, but individuate, meaning finding themselves, finding their purpose. Those kinds of experiences are valuable.

Debra: So if you have a great family life, just be grateful, you’re part of the seventy percent. And if you have challenges, I think the key thing to leave with is that it doesn’t have to make a permanent scar on your life. You don’t have to be defined by it, because that’s only happening on the ego level, and we all know we’re much more than the ego. There’s something deeper within us that has never been harmed, has never been damaged.

That is pure potential within us. This is from the Upanishads, in Eastern philosophy, so we know it to be true. We’ll see you next week, when we go deeper into how we unravel this, how someone works with these archetypal roles and the splits, and how they work with projection. I think it’s going to be really interesting. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.