Parent-Child Estrangement & How to Heal (Season 2 | Episode 58)

Parent-Child Estrangement (and how to heal) (Season 2 | Episode 58) If Estrangement is In Your Life… [Tessa] You will find a lot of value in this episode. We have two guest voices on this episode. Jonathan Pillot and Dr. Joshua Coleman. You may remember Jonathan from Episode 45 Labeling And Unlabeling With Jonathan Pillot. Jonathan shares a painful episode of estrangement from his daughter and Dr. Coleman provides incredible insights. There may be a kind of “epidemic of estrangement” occurring in our society now, that Dr. Coleman speaks to in this episode. He speaks from personal experience and from the work he does with so many adults trying to understand their estranged children. A tough show to hear… but one of incredible value for those in this situation. An Excerpt from Our Show [Dr. Coleman] I made all the mistakes that I see parents commonly make, which was to defend, to explain, to deny. But eventually, I learned to just listen and empathize and more importantly, to take responsibility and really care about [my child’s] experience and make that what was prioritized, not my experience or how wronged I felt. [I focused on] how hurt or neglected or unloved she felt, which is the worst thing any parent can hear. Dr. Joshua Coleman Dr. Coleman is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-partisan organization of leading sociologists, historians, psychologists and demographers dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and bestpractice findings about American families. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC THINK, The Behavioral Scientist, CNN, MarketWatch, the San Francisco Chronicle, Greater Good Magazine, AEON, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Variety, and more. He has given talks to the faculties at Harvard, the Weill Cornell Department of Psychiatry and other academic institutions. A frequent guest on the Today Show and NPR he has also been featured on Sesame Street, 20/20, Good Morning America, PBS, America Online Coaches, and numerous news programs for FOX, ABC, CNN, and NBC television. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and has written four books: The Rules of Estrangement (Random House); The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony (St. Martin’s Press); The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (St. Martin’s Press); When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along (HarperCollins) Dr. Coleman is the co-editor, along with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use, a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family, gender, sexuality, poverty, and work-family issues. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Polish, and Croatian. He is co-founder with researcher Dr. Becca Bland of Standing Together, a center for advancing awareness of family estrangement. Dr. Coleman is the father of three adult children, has a teenage grandson and lives with his wife in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He also writes music for television which has appeared on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Lethal Weapon, Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Pretty Little Liars, Longmire, Shameless, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and many other shows. Resources for You We want to provide you with support and many many resources for your own Open Nesting Journey. Our resource page has so much to offer as does our private discussion group on Facebook about queerness and other topics of interest: Open Nesters Resource Page The Open Nesters Private Facebook Group ask to join and we’ll let you in Free Q&A WEBINARS