Are We Too Quick To Cut Off Family?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Jordana Abraham (0:28)

If it's too stressful and she's not coming to your wedding, you could say, hey, I know I'm going to have so much to do the two weeks before my wedding. I don't think I'm going to be able to make it.

Dr. Naomi Bernstein (0:37)

And then the friendship will die right there.

Jordana Abraham (0:41)

A quick note before we get into the episode, Oversharing is a podcast for entertainment purposes only. It is not a medical podcast and does not constitute medical or psychological advice. Always seek the advice of your physician or mental health professional. Hello and welcome back to Oversharing. I'm Jordana Abraham.

Dr. Naomi Bernstein (0:58)

And I am Dr. Naomi Bernstein.

Jordana Abraham (1:01)

I wanted to get into to discuss this article that I came across and I like saved it. And especially I think this was relevant because we get a lot of emails about people cutting off their family members.

And a couple weeks ago or three maybe like three weeks ago, we had an email that a lot of response about like, I think we, someone whose brother would say like really mean comments to her and kind of was like publicly humiliating her and how to handle that. I think we had kind of like tried to give her some tips to make it work. But you see like a lot of people in our, in our comments who responded with like, you should just cut him off. And if your family enables him, like you should just kind of like cut them off too, was a lot of what I saw in response to that. If your family can't protect you from him, then like you should cut them off too.

So I thought this article was really interesting. It's on, it's in the Wall Street Journal. And it's basically saying, it says more American adults are cutting off their parents. Experts say it's becoming an epidemic. And basically there's these quotes like in their minds, they see themselves as more enlightened and therefore more justified to cut off for more reasons. And they're saying like in previous generations, people were more likely to kind of ignore abuse and younger adults now have a broader definition than older people about psychological harm. And they view repeated criticism, strong disagreements and other painful relationship complexes, abusive. A lot of therapists say they were kind of conceptualizing it. And they were saying that parents of adult children, so like people in our parents generation, let's say, have this idea of compulsory kinship, which is basically like family is like the number one thing above all else. And so you kind of just like deal with like a family member that you have issues with. You're never the solution is never to not speak to them. But now that idea is increasingly challenged by this notion of democratized kinship, which is basically the idea of maintaining family ties. It depends on their quality. So you only need to keep your family and your life if they are bringing a higher quality of life to you, I guess.

Dr. Naomi Bernstein (3:12)

Right.

Jordana Abraham (3:13)

So I wanted to hear your take, because I know you're kind of like anti-estrangement generally.

Dr. Naomi Bernstein (3:18)

Yeah, it's definitely interesting. And I think it has evolved almost a little bit. It's because our quality of life has improved in some ways overall. Like even we talked a little bit on the Calm the Fuck Down episode about going generations back.

It was like a lot of people were living in more like poverty type situations or immigration situations, and parents were just like scraping by and their parents were just barely getting food on the table and barely getting the rent paid.

Jordana Abraham (4:01)

And also you're immigrants, you also like need your family, yes, I think kind of because you don't know anyone in this whole fucking country.

Dr. Naomi Bernstein (4:09)

Right. You don't know anyone. You're feeling kind of like maybe you're the only person that speaks my language. You're the only person that looks like me. Maybe we were talking about being a family that came from Holocaust survivors. So you're sort of like, I don't even know who can trust people, don't even like Jewish people. I want to be able to stay near people that feel safe to me or even just like we need to share this house.