HOST: Today on Peace Talks Radio, we discuss one of the most urgent peace and justice issues facing our country today. The crisis of working homelessness,
“The chasm between the reality of what homelessness looks like and the myths and stereotypes that we as a society have indulged when it comes to homelessness is pretty profound”
(Brian Goldstone clip)
HOST: And later on the program. Have you ever felt like you're stuck in the same old family patterns? On part two of this episode, we hear from a family therapist who's helping people break free when they think about rifts in families.
“You think it was this one big moment, and that's actually one of the false beliefs that I contend with a lot in this space is people say, I had one fight with this person, and then they stop speaking to me, and that's rarely ever the case”
(Whitney Goodman clip)
HOST: All coming up on Peace Talks Radio.
This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. Whether it's the search for Inner Peace, harmony in our closest relationships or understanding in our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and beyond, we explore it here on Peace Talks Radio. From personal moments to global movements we consider what it takes to build a more peaceful world.
I am Jessica Ticktin. Journalist Brian Goldstone spent years following the lives of working class families in Atlanta. In his new book, “There's no place for us: working and homeless in Americ” Housing is not just an economic issue, it's a foundation for peace, security, and dignity.
In this conversation, Goldstone helps us understand how the struggle for shelter connects to the broader pursuit of justice and what it'll take to build a more peaceful society where everyone has a place to call home. And later in the program, therapist Whitney Goodman explains how shifting the way we think about family can lead to more honest and peaceful relationships.
First, here's my interview with Brian Goldstone.
You described the lives of families navigating homelessness with such intimacy and care, you know, which I loved. How do you see your work contributing to a more peaceful and just society?
BRIAN GOLDSTONE: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your kind words. It really means a lot and it's really great to be with you.
I think a lot of journalists wrongly misconstrue their job as, as one of just simply presenting information. I don't see journalism that way. I see journalism as a way of. Being factual and, and not allowing in any distortions of the truth. But I also feel like at least just speaking for my own work, there is a real moral, and I would add political sensibility and orientation that again, I hope will be evident. Uh, even in the times where I'm not speaking in my own voice, just in the decisions to foreground certain moments and to show the pain and the suffering that is so needlessly and in such preventable ways, being inflicted on the families and children that I follow in this book, it's just that. In following these five families over a period of several years, the reporting itself lasted five plus years, but the time period covered in the book is like two plus years.
My hope is that by following these families in their journey, in their really desperate attempt to secure. Housing this most basic human necessity that we can at once pinpoint all of all of the policies and systems and structures that have been set up to actively militate against their stability. Also ways that we might imagine a different kind of future, a different kind of society.
I should also add that in talking about these five families, they are very much meant to stand in for not thousands or tens of thousands, not even hundreds of thousands, but really millions of other families and individuals like them right now in America. So the scale of the problem truly is immense.
And my hope is that my reporting and writing will contribute to a collective and very collaborative project of ensuring that this most basic human necessity is given to everyone in this richest nation on the planet.
HOST: I guess in your intro you say, today there isn't a single state metropolitan area or a county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two bedroom apartment.
That's just a shocking statistic. Uh, my question is, what do stories of housing insecurity reveal about the foundations of a peaceful and stable community? I mean, if there's that many people. In that situation, how, how can there be peace and stability as a nation?
Brian: To the extent that Americans are aware of the growing threat of housing insecurity in this country, I think very often these things can become abstractions that obscure the, the human toll of these phenomena, so talking about a housing crisis, even citing statistics like the one you just did, which I was absolutely shocked by when I encountered it, the fact that Chris in a single city. County or metro area in the entire country where someone earning the local minimum wage. And it's important to note that that is the local minimum wage, not the federal minimum wage.
The local minimum wage is often higher than the federal minimum wage, that even those earning the local minimum wage can't afford. Just a modest two bedroom apartment. It should be, should be shocking, but even a statistic like that can kind of become rote and it can become. It can sort of lose the reality of the suffering that is contained within that statistic.
Part of why my reporting method of, of kind of immersing myself as much as humanly possible in the day-to-day lives of these five families, the reason that felt so crucial to me. Is because I wanted them to encounter this human disaster, this human catastrophe anew. I wanted them to be shocked anew, to see it with fresh eyes.
I, I have a background in anthropology. In Anthropology 101 courses, we say the purpose of anthropology is to take things that we have taken for granted that have just become common sense or status quo and, and really see it with fresh eyes. And nowhere, I think, is that more urgently needed than when it comes to housing in this country and what we've allowed housing to become in, in effect, you know, hoarded up.
And auctioned off to the highest bidder. My hope is that the reporting that I've done and the way that these stories unfold will allow precisely that transformation to take place where readers will be shocked out of the complacency. I think that we as a country, have approached housing with that. We've treated housing with.
HOST: Right. I think that's why it was so powerful 'cause of the way that you wrote it. I was so immersed in their lives and it reminded me of another book that I loved so much, which is Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.
Brian: Um, one of my favorite books of all time.
HOST: Mine too! A hundred percent really shows that you're an anthropologist and you can really we're immersed in the day-to-day lives.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. So some people may read this book and think. Why didn't Britt, for example, use birth control? She had a great opportunity to go to college and then dropped out in in her first year because she became pregnant, or Kara was already struggling with two kids and they continued to have casual encounters that resulted in pregnancy.
What do you say to people who chalk this up to things like poor choices or irresponsibility?
Brian: Yeah, it's a really important question because that is a very common response, not only to my book, but anytime an article is written about any kind of social injustice, really anything having to do with poverty or the social safety net, a certain kind of reader will always focus in on the choices that people made and kind of neglect the larger structures.
It felt very important to me to resist the urge as I think a really kind of well-intentioned social justice journalism or research can do, which is, it's a tendency to present people as these like angelic figures who are just hardworking and making all the right choices, doing all the right things, and, and it's still not enough or, you know, and kind of like trimming off all of their.
Edges and blemishes. And for me it was important just to show people how they actually are. I think it can be just as dehumanizing to deny people their flaws as it can be to simply present them in, you know, bad terms and in a bad light and pathologize them. So it felt really important just to show them as humans.
And I think it's also important to show in that process that at least with these particular. People who I'm writing about the book, you mentioned Brit, Kara, you know, they are their own harshest critics. There is no judgment that we can level at Kara for, you know, having children with different men, that she hasn't already leveled it herself.
In fact, that was one of the most heartbreaking things for me to witness during this process. Even more than the larger, you know, structural forces. The systems that were, that were, as I said, just militating against their stability. It was to see the shame. That these parents had internalized, even when I was saying to them, look, you know, okay, fine.
Like we all make bad choices. We all do things we regret, but like, look at all these ways that this could have been avoided. Like if this, if these systems were designed differently or if this exploitation was not so rampant. I think it is real that in this book, you know, four of the families of the five are, are comprised, you know, single mothers with their children.
And the question of where are the men is is not an unjustified question at all. I think it's equally important that one of the, one of the families is a two parent household and that even them even having two incomes. Does is not enough to keep them from being pushed into homelessness. You know, someone came up to me after a talk the other day and said, you know, where, where are the fathers?
Where are the men? Why aren't these women using contraception? And and my response to that was to kind of flip the question around and say, you know, single parenthood, even single motherhood is not a phenomenon that is unique to America, but what is more unique to America, at least among. Developed, you know, industrialized countries is the fact that if you are a single mother, you are very likely to be consigned to a life of insecurity and and poverty.
And so I would turn that around on us as a society and say, why is it that being a single parent is so much more likely than in other peer countries? To lead to this kind of lifelong insecurity, not only for the parents, but for their children as well. And, and that brings it back to just the, the utter lack of a, of a social safety net in this country.
A lack of subsidized childcare, a lack of healthcare, a lack of so many other things that when they all come together, allows this kind of precarity to persist.
HOST: This is Peace Talks Radio. I'm Jessica Titon and I'm speaking with Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place For Us Working and Homeless in America.
Your sections of the book, you have Equilibrium Storm, possibility Rupture, and then the New American Homeless. How did you decide to create these sections, and what's that story that you're telling in these titles?
Brian: Hmm. I mean, when people say, oh, this book is beautifully written, or the, the structure is really compelling, or it really pulls you in, and all of that stuff.
I should just say it was like so much the result of a collaboration with my editor, her name's Amanda Cook, and absolutely incredible. Not just human being, but an incredible editor. We spent months outlining the book before I even began the process of writing it. I think my initial outline, it was just like, it was just a mess of like, here's all of the drama upfront.
I'm gonna lead with these really dramatic moments, these evictions at gunpoint, or the massive eviction of families from this low-income housing tax credit apartment in this gentrifying neighborhood. I'm, and Amanda was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's, let's think about a different structure that's both truer to the chronology and the timeline, but also that.
I think it's important that Amanda recommended starting for instance, with Michelle and her family on Christmas Eve, and Michelle is wearing a Santa hat and she's cooking Christmas Eve dinner for her kids and dancing to Michael Jackson with her, with her teenage son, and the chapter ends not with some.
You know, dramatic episode, but it, it ends with them, uh, building a gingerbread house together in their apartment. It was so important to have that kind of structure because when the storm, which is the title of another part of the book, when the storm does take place and the rupture occurs, it is felt in a more visceral way by readers because you see how avoidable that was, and you see what life felt like before the crisis.
And that kind of contrast is really important. I think so much reporting on poverty and even social science research on poverty, we only see people in their most anguished moments, and that I think neutralizes the effect of really grasping the magnitude of this, the meaning of it, because we didn't see what came prior.
Host: Yeah. It also makes it more relatable, you know, because you do see those scenes that are normal family scenes and. You see kids being kids, you see a lot of things that I think to your point, that tell a bigger story, a fuller story. How does the stress of housing insecurity affect not just individuals, but the larger social fabric around them? So like schools, workplaces, and local economies?
Brian: I think. As it emerges in this book, and this is definitely now my perspective on housing insecurity and homelessness, housing insecurity. It's like it emerges in the book as this kind of like corrosive substance that, that, um, seeps into so many areas of life.
A term that I encounter during this research that is used by public health experts to talk about the effect that all of this insecurity has on children is toxic stress. And just to like linger with that term for a moment. Toxic stress. You know, stress. So chronic, so debilitating that it, it literally chokes futures. It, it chokes long-term development. It alters brain chemistry. That is what we're talking about when we talk about housing insecurity and, and conversely, we know that housing stability, its implications are equally far reaching just its housing insecurity touches so much beyond housing per se, so too housing stability.
Allows kids to begin to flourish in schools. It restores mental and physical health. I think I have this new appreciation for housing having done this, this project and, and done this reporting that housing really is the foundation upon which so much in our society, or at least a functioning society is built.
And, and it's why it feels. Especially pernicious and destructive that we have allowed, again, housing to just become this commodity that is auctioned off to the highest bidder. And we've allowed what a case manager in the book, Carla Wells, refers to as the Housing Hunger Games. To just become our norm.
And that housing Hunger Games where this kind of survival of the fittest, where if you can afford these skyrocketing rents on your low wages, if you can manage somehow to stay in an apartment with your kids, great. But if you can't, well you're left to fend for yourself. That is the reality for millions and millions of people in this country right now.
And the, again, the consequences go so far beyond having a roof overhead in and of itself. It extends into education, healthcare, it touches everything.
HOST: Yeah. I mean, especially when it concerns peace. I was thinking about that. How. That toxic stress, you could see that as the book progressed, the stress would get to some of these single moms and the sort of, um, violence or threat of violence and the anger that would come out helped me understand, I guess. So much of what you're saying, how all these things are integrated.
Brian: You know, there's a moment in the book that I don't think I've spoken about publicly at all. No one has really asked me about this moment. It's a kind of minor moment in the book, but at the time it was so harrowing to witness and it's when.
Kara is at the park with her children. They're celebrating Grace Kara's daughter celebrating her birthday. They've, they're eating pizza. It's like a relative moment of, of happiness and calm for the family. For Kara and her four children, they're having pizza, they're eating cake and everyone's kinda laughing and then accidentally Kara's son spills.
Juice on Kara's cell phone and immediately the spell breaks and Kara snaps at her son and, and curses at him. I comment, you know, in the book I say, someone passing by at that moment would have thought, okay, this is an abusive parent, like the way she's talking to her children right now, this is like scary and.
What they wouldn't know is that that cell phone was the only, was, was the key to Kara being able to provide for her children because she was driving for DoorDash. She, she and her children were homeless at this point. She's driving for DoorDash. She needs the cell phone in order to. In order to get orders and to be a DoorDash driver.
And if her phone breaks, she loses her her means of earning money. And that prospect for her was so terrifying in that moment that it caused her to behave in that way. And so that's what we're not seeing that when you walk by is scene like that. In real life, we don't see the larger context and, and yeah, you extrapolate from that moment and you see how.
How anger and violence and, and paranoid toxicity, all of these things can sort of extend outward. You, you see how road rage can, can become the norm and you know, but we're, we're surrounded by people all the time who are dealing with varying degrees of this kind of anxiety and stress, and it affects the parents, it affects their children, it affects single people, married people.
It affects everybody. It's very, very important to, to have that kind of perspective and understanding I believe.
HOST: This is Peace Talks Radio. I'm Jessica Ticktin and I'm speaking with Brian Goldstone, author of There is No Place for Us Working Homeless in America. Um, sorry. Working and homeless in America. So you end the book with the line.
“We have the solutions. We have the resources. What we need now is the will to act.”
So what can every, everyday people do individually or collectively to foster greater housing, justice and peace in their communities?
Brian: Yeah. You know, one of the heroes in the book, LA Pink, when readers encounter her, I hope they encounter her the way I did, which is.
In real life, which is just as this, like the sun breaking through the clouds, just like a, a glimmer of hope. I think that readers can emulate la pink in the sense that like pink, and many people like her, these are people who have the least to spare in terms of money, in terms of resources, but they are just giving the most, they, they are showing up for their neighbors.
In solidarity, in care, even just in the kind of tone of voice that they use. Even if they don't have the money, even if they don't have the, the resources, like they're just showing up. They're putting their bodies, their physical bodies in spaces where they encounter need, and they're meeting that need with what they have.
And so I think that. People who want to get involved in addressing this calamity, this calamity of, of homelessness and housing insecurity. It can run the gamut from some small moments like that just, yes, that can be volunteering. It can be just like going to a food pantry on a Saturday morning and talking, not even volunteering, just talking to the people online.
What is your life like, listening to people's stories? Some of the most transformative moments in the book or. Like when, not necessarily when people, when their material circumstances are being drastically changed through some intervention, but just where someone is listening to them and not cutting them off and just wanting to hear what it's like to be them.
What it's like to struggle in this way to work and work and work and more, work some more, and it's still not enough. I do believe that as important as solidarity is as important as individual acts of charity are. If this crisis is going to end, it is going to be because large scale structural change was insisted upon at every level, local, state, federal, and you know, I, something I have begun to say in talking about this book is that you know, homelessness is a policy choice, and that that is good news because it means that we can choose differently. It means that we can choose to enact different policies. It means that. This kind of insecurity is not eternal and intractable. People need a place to live it. It's voting for people who are going to, who are not only gonna have a rhetoric of addressing this crisis, but who are committed through policy to meeting this catastrophe.
With the urgency and resources that it requires, the investment that it requires. Uh, and another really important thing is just being in solidarity with, with tenants who are organizing for, for better conditions in their buildings, who are organizing for tenant rights and tenant protections that in many states don't exist.
Organizing for rent stabilization, things like that, where that can really make the difference between people being displaced or being able to remain in their homes. A, a huge piece missing from our kind of national discussion of homelessness is not just getting people off the street into housing. They don't yet have, but preventing homelessness from happening to begin with.
And that happens through eviction defense. It, it happens through emergency. Cash assistance for people who, because they missed one paycheck or their kid was sick and they don't have sick leave from work, they're on the verge of losing their home through an eviction. So how do we intervene in those moments to prevent homelessness from happening to begin with?
So we need a really expansive vision, but I think what we need at the, at the foundation of all of this is the kind of paradigm shift around. How we think about housing to begin with. And I think again, we need to be shocked that we have allowed the housing hunger games to become our status quo.
HOST: It really is about us all, like you said, thinking very differently about what housing means to all of us.And I think this is relevant for the show because we talk so much about how do we create more peace in our communities, in our lives, in our homes, in our own minds. And there is no way to do that if we are not concerned about the people who are living in our communities, in their cars, in these, you know, long term stay motels.
I mean, that it's, it's in every community.
Brian: I did an event recently with a woman named Sarah Nelson, who's the head of the Flight attendant Union in America. She is just an incredible human being. She's a kind of dynamo in the world of labor organizing. And she read the book and she said something that could almost be an epigraph.
At the beginning of the book, she said, before we can fix the crisis, we first have to feel the crisis. And, and that I think is, is what I was trying to do in. Telling the stories in this way and in reporting the book in this way with this degree of intimacy, going beyond even the superficial details of people's lives and just going into these very private, very intimate moments to really allow readers to feel this crisis so that we can finally fix it.
Because you know, as I said earlier, treating it as an abstraction and even citing these figures often is. Not only is it not enough, but it's often at cross purposes with mobilizing the emotional fuel that is needed to pursue a different kind of society and a different kind of world. I'm all about empathy.
I'm all about compassion, but I also think we need anger that when Sarah. Said, we need to feel the crisis, that we need to feel anger. I think anger is an underestimated emotion even when it comes to peacemaking and creating a world, a nonviolent world, those, those are not opposite things, and I think we need to be angry that that people are allowed to suffer so needlessly and in such devastating ways all around us, in our communities.
HOST: That was my interview with journalist Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place For Us Working and Homeless in America. To learn more about our guests and to listen to past episodes, visit our website@peacetalksradio.com. There's also a donate button where you can contribute to our nonprofit work.
Tune in for part two for practical tips on turning duty into authentic connection. In part two of this program, we'll hear from a family therapist who's helping people break free. Whitney Goodman offers powerful insights on how to transform tension and create a family that feels less like a burden and more like a choice that's coming up after this short break.
For correspondent Amber Worthham, co-founders, Paul Ingles and Suzanne Kryder. I'm Jessica Ticktin. Thanks so much for listening to and for supporting Peace Talks Radio back in a moment. Stay tuned.
(Music Break)
HOST: This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. Whether it's the search for Inner Peace, harmony in our closest relationships or understanding in our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and beyond, we explore it here on Peace Talks Radio. From personal moments to global movements, we consider what it takes to build a more peaceful world.
I'm Jessica Ticktin. On this edition of Peace Talks Radio, we explore what happens when we approach family, the way we approach close friendships with curiosity, respect, and a willingness to grow. Too often family is tied to obligation, leaving unspoken expectations, old hurts or broken bonds. But what if we shifted away from duty and towards chosen connection?
In this episode, correspondent Ambar Worthham speaks with Whitney Goodman, a licensed family therapist, about how reframing family dynamics can reduce resentment and open the door to authenticity.
Whitney Goodman: My name is Whitney Goodman, and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. I've been practicing for about a decade now, and I've always worked with family issues, but over the last five years I've really honed in on working with dysfunctional families, especially estrangement between adult children and their parents.
I currently run groups at Calling Home, which is my online community that helps adults with family relationships. And then I still have a small online private practice in Florida as well. And I am also a mother of two.
Ambar Wortham: Coming into your practice and why, your specific focus on families where other people may be familiar with the context of family therapy or therapy in general with individuals?
Whitney: Yeah, I always wanted to work systemically, so thinking about how different groups interact with one another. I grew up with a very large extended family. Family has always been something that had a large impact on my life, for better or for worse at times. And I don't think that we can really separate the impact of family from our lives. And so I've become really interested in the ways that our family relationships can totally change how we interact with the world.
I've done a lot of work as an individual therapist with family issues, but what I found was that I wanted to get all of those people together in a room so badly because I thought, gosh, if all these people could just meet each other, it would be so much more impactful than them talking to me.
And I spent the better part of a year and a half building up this program to make that happen. And luckily that has proven to be true. That has just been so incredible to watch these people with family issues, find other people out there like them, and learn and grow from those conversations. It's so nice to know that you're not alone in those situations.
That can seem so isolating.
Ambar: What do you hear from your community of the challenges that they face with their family?
Whitney: So the biggest feeling that gets echoed is this sense of, I thought I was the only one. And also feeling like there's something wrong with me if there's something wrong with my family.
And I think we grow up hearing a lot of these messages of, oh, they come from a. Good family or a broken home. There's a lot of this language out there that really tells us that we are a representation of our family relationships and that we should feel some sense of shame if those relationships aren't good or if they don't work out when really it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that.
Ambar: Absolutely. Hearing that you come from a large extended family, I definitely relate to that a lot. Would you be willing to share like how you fit within the universe of your large family?
Whitney: Yeah. I am the oldest of three children. My parents are both one of four and have quite a lot of cousins. I think there's people in my family that we refer to as cousins that maybe aren't actually my cousins, but by, by blood at least.
But I grew up really having this like more the merrier type of culture around family and having very large family gatherings, family being of the utmost importance. And then I also saw within my family, my extended family, fractured relationships and. Things that did not go the way that you would hope they would go for a variety of reasons, and I think it has shown me how valuable those relationships are, but also how impactful they can be in a negative way when they're not handled correctly or when things fall apart.
And I've seen that echoed time and time again in my professional work as well.
Ambar: For people who may be listening and resonate with either one of those of, yeah, I was always picked on, or, that wasn't a big deal, was it? Could you share a little bit of what those interactions can do to these one-on-one relationships and how they can perhaps ripple across the family system when they think about riffs in families?
Whitney: You think it was this one big moment and that's actually one of the. False beliefs that I contend with a lot in this space is people say, I had one fight with this person, and then they stop speaking to me, and that's rarely ever the case. It's usually like death by a thousand cuts. And then we have this one last big event that the other person labels as the rupture.
But there was a lot that happened up to that point. And when I'm thinking about cousins or siblings in a family who have that type of dynamic. A lot of what is happening is that the adults are not intervening in those interactions at the time that they should. So they continue on as the kids age and become adults.
Most children in a family are trying to find their place, what is my identity in this family? What am I known for? How do people see me? And when that consistently gets reinforced, whether that's through another child in the family or the adults. It's very easy to take on that role and feel like, I can't grow out of this.
No one will see me any differently. And then we start to develop these bigger rifts between family members of, if we have two cousins here and one says, I feel like you think I'm inferior to you, or that you're better than me, or You've accomplished so much more, it can be hard to break out of those dynamics, and I find that sometimes that ends up leading to distance or estrangement because that person feels like they cannot achieve their potential or be themselves within that family system because they've been put in this hole and no one wants them to get out.
It's like everyone keeps being like, no, go back to the place that we put you in. And that's very hard. It's demoralize it.
Ambar: This is Ambar Wortham, and I'm speaking with Whitney Goodman from calling Home today on her show about finding peace within her homes by relating to relatives as friends rather than family.
That sounds so isolating as well. What do you think about the role of friendship and a person reclaiming their identity?
Whitney: I think that can be so powerful and often in the estrangement space. We're looking at friendship typically as chosen family. So the people that you are relating to in that way, and sometimes those people know this version of you even better than your family because your family is stuck with the childlike version of you and they don't want you to grow out of that.
I think sometimes for some people it's easier for them to have surface level. Kind of light, like we talk about the weather and see each other on holidays, relationships with their family simply because they don't have a ton in common other than being related. And there's a bit of luck involved in that too, right?
When you find families who all share the same interests and political beliefs in religion, like that just happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for you and you feel very different in your family. I think that friendship can be such a great way to get those needs met and take the pressure off of your family relationships to meet those needs when it can't.
Ambar: That is so interesting. It's more luck than anything. Can you delve deeper there?
Whitney: Totally. So, I think there are certain families where there is a really intense culture to all be the same, right? You're gonna see that in certain religious groups, certain cultures, even certain parts of the country in the United States where there are family systems that feel like we all need to go to the same college, have the same religion, marry this certain type of partner, and any descent from that is very threatening to the family.
So you're going to see families where everybody commits to that because they don't wanna be rejected. And sometimes on its face, I think those families look very cohesive and great, but sometimes there's people who are silently suffering in those families because they're squashing the real them in favor of being that way.
Then you're gonna find families that I think fall into that luck category where they really, truly just, they all like the same things. They get along and their personalities mesh well together, and part of that's by design. The parents doing a great job in raising them in a safe place and creating a good family culture, but also very lucky.
And then I think there are families who have a much greater tolerance for differences and allowing the people within that family to pursue their own lives and develop their own identities, and they can tolerate that.
Ambar: You shared that and I felt an exhale. No, it's sometimes just the luck of the draw. It doesn't have to be this inherent thing, but sometimes there's this pressure, right? To feel like there is…
Whitney: If anyone is listening to this and you're the person in your family that feels like I'm the only one that's different. I'm the only one that doesn't fit in. There's no reason to blame or shame yourself for that because sometimes it really just is that you're the one that's different and your family can either embrace that or reject it, and when they reject it, it's not your fault.
That's what's happening, and that's not always a sign that you should then try to conform. It's very difficult because who wants to have to be the one to say, I either have to hide myself or change, or my family's going to reject me, or I have to remove myself from this. I think that it's so immensely painful, and that's the one hill I really will die on, is that nobody wants to have to be rejecting their family there.
It's, it's very difficult.
Ambar: This is Ambar Wortham and I'm speaking with Whitney Goodman from calling Home today on her show about finding peace within her homes by relating to relatives as friends rather than family. What does that rejection feel like in the body that people wanna ignore or push away from that as much as possible.
Whitney: I've really heard it be equated to a death the way that it feels to have someone cut you off or to be the one doing the cutoff is, both sides are immensely painful for different reasons, and I think that when you have to end a relationship, especially with a parent, which is a lot of what I work with it, it can really feel like you're losing a limb because that is one of your earliest attachment relationships.
It's someone that you spent your life with, you expect it to have in your life forever, and it's a very strange type of grief, especially if that person is still alive. Maybe the person who's listening is, ah, I've tried so many times. Or why won't, why doesn't the other person listen to this or hear this out? What are some of the recommendations you have maybe for the other family member who is oblivious to this desire to connect or to resolve this conflict that's between the two parties?
Whitney: Yeah. The obliviousness is something that I hear about a lot, that the person who's typically on the receiving end of the estrangement might feel very shocked, or even that's on the receiving end of a complaint.
Prior to any like cutoff happening of, oh my gosh, I did not know that this was going on. I'm blindsided. I'm shocked. I think that it's okay to have that feeling because some of us are not paying attention out of survival. Like we just don't wanna see what's going on in the family. We don't wanna be aware.
And when that awareness is forced in your face there, there's a problem. It's painful and it's jarring. And sometimes people need a minute to adjust. But then I think that we have to be honest, that repair, like true repair, not brushing things under the rug. Requires both parties to really be honest about how much power they have in that relationship.
Some of these family relationships are between equals and some are not. And I'm a big believer that unless a parent is like elderly or disabled or can be taken advantage of in that way, they typically still have power even over their child in adulthood. But with siblings, things can be different or with cousins.
And so thinking about the power differential. And also about what do I need to be accountable for here and what do I need to apologize for, repair and change my behavior around? And I think that when we can learn that skill within our families and not equate apologies or repair with like I'm a bad person, but just that this is part of relationships that are long term.
We have a lot better chance of repairing and continuing those relationships.
Ambar: I never thought about that in that way. Our familial relationships being long distant relationships, I never, yeah, that's so interesting.
Whitney: Yeah, because I think throughout history. They weren't that way. In a lot of ways. Our family relationships were a given because we would work with our families.
We would live on their property. In some cultures, they would dictate who you would marry. They would be involved in raising your children, that now you can move away from your family. You can just not call them. There's so many ways to achieve distance now that we didn't use to have. That also makes it harder to maintain and these relationships in a legitimate way.
Ambar: I'm not a therapist at all. Why do you think the dynamics between friends and family is so different? Could you share a little bit of that paradox with friends and family? Yeah, and the treatment we receive from them.
Whitney: This is something that I feel like I am fighting against regularly within my work that I'm very passionate about.
We tend to assume because our relationships with family are unconditional and really set in stone that we should be entitled to treat people anyway and they cannot end that relationship because we are family. Where we might instead reserve better behavior for our friends because we feel like there's a little bit more risk involved in losing those relationships.
And I really think that family should treat each other the best. If we are going to be using that standard, it's not that I can treat you anyway and you can't walk away, it's actually that I should be treating you so well because you are my family. And one thing that I typically butt up against in my work is that a lot of people will tell me, my family member treated me horribly behind closed doors, whether that's a parent, a grandparent, but I saw them go out and be so nice to other people and, and even people who are in abusive marriages like witness this as well with their partners of, I know that they're capable of it and I've seen them do it, and they do it for other people, but they're not doing it for me at home.
And that can be a really difficult thing to wrap your head around, especially as a child.
Ambar: I know growing up, one thing my mother always told me was that I wasn't one of her little friends.
Whitney: Very common line. Yes.
Ambar: But for people who have age mates or maybe siblings within their families, what are the tools they can use to treat their little cousin or their younger sister more like their best friend?
Whitney: I think it's so important in adulthood for siblings, cousins, people are on like equal or equal footing in their family to establish adult relationships outside of the hierarchy of the family. So that means that I have a separate relationship with my sister outside of the relationship that we have with our mother.
And a lot of times there can be. A lot of triangulation happening where mom steps in and gossips about the sister, and then the sister goes to this one. And so it's really important that those adult siblings say, let's imagine that we just met each other out and we became friends. How would we develop a relationship together?
And there is a process of really getting to know that person in adulthood and allowing them to become someone different than they were.
Ambar: What would you say are the benefits of just trying that out at least?
Whitney: Yeah. Whenever I'm talking about the work with families, I'm always trying to hold these two realities that like family relationships are incredibly important and valuable to our lives.
And dysfunctional, abusive, harmful relationships have a very big negative impact on us. And if there is a person who is saying, I just don't really know this person anymore. I wanna connect with them, but they're not harmful to me, that's the type of person that I would say it's probably worth putting in some effort to get to know this person because.
You don't know where life is going to go, when you might want to have this relationship, what it might be like to connect over your shared history and your values and your culture and your lineage. That just having that connection is valuable and sometimes those connections become more valuable to us as we age or as we have children.
We want to invest. That more, and sometimes you have to wait until that becomes more of like a value for you. But if this person is actively hurting you and it's not behavior you would tolerate from a friend or anyone else, then no, probably not a good relationship to invest a lot of effort in.
Ambar: This is Ambar Wortham and I'm speaking with Whitney Goodman from calling home today on her show about finding peace within her homes by relating to relatives as friends rather than family.
What about those relationships where people don't even know why they don't talk anymore? What would you say are like ways to mend that relationship after some time of either no contact or just no effort?
Whitney: Yeah, I think it's okay to just call it out and be like. Somebody has to break the ice mentioning that there's been some distance, a lot of time has passed.
If there was a rift that didn't get resolved, if that's truly what you wanna do, is try to fix that. I wouldn't immediately go to, let's plan a trip together, but like slowly getting back into that person's orbit. Especially because I do find that a lot of these rifts, especially between like cousins, aunts and uncles.
Sometimes they come from an older generation's issues that they were having. And so then you didn't get to spend time with those kids or you didn't meet this person. And once that is over, you can find like shared commonality and form a relationship.
Ambar: I really appreciate you bringing that up because that's one element that the cousins brought up, Michelle and Kelly.
Whitney: Oh, interesting. They brought up Interesting. Okay.
Ambar: They brought up this element of inherited conflict, if you will, and Uhhuh.
Whitney: Great word.
Ambar: Have you heard of within your group, or just like in your general practice of how people have navigated those waters of wanting to be friends with their relatives, but feeling like there, it's a betrayal almost too.
Whitney: It of course depends on the level of the betrayal. So I have dealt with families where there is a specific type of abuse that is quite horrible that's happened, and if you were to interact with that other person, it's the person that harmed them. And it would be akin to having a relationship with someone's like attacker.
Very different. But there's other situations where it's just like. Aunt Jane doesn't talk to Aunt Sally and she tells you that everyone that was born in her lineage is awful and terrible. And that's not true. They are all their own people. And so we sometimes have to understand that some of these older generations are very much trying to protect themselves and that we have to take the lead of saying, I love you Aunt Jane.
I think you're wonderful. I understand where you're hurt, but I also wanna have a relationship. This family member, and I hope that you can see that I'm not doing this because I want hurt you or do anything to you, but I wanna connect with this person. It's, this also tends to happen a lot once people pass, and then you see people start to reach out and try to reconnect when that person is gone.
But it's very sad when it takes until that time.
Ambar: In a way to be proactive, to not have tragedy lead reconnection, what do you think are elements of friendships that people who do wanna truly be friends with their relatives can adapt and bring that into their familial relationships?
Whitney: Sometimes people now are much more willing to have fun with their friends and show interest in one another's like hobbies or activities and try to find shared experiences.
Sometimes with family, it's just like, because we're family, we should just hang out instead of. Trying to get to know what the other person likes and is interested in and planning things to do together, that would be fun. I believe that the act of repair and saying sorry is sometimes easier in friendships because it feels less scary.
And so some people struggle with it across the board, but some people are a lot better at it with their friends. And that's the number one thing I think we need to bring into our family relationships is repair and the ability to admit when we've hurt someone. That is a whole word.
Older generations may not say, I love you, but I will make you some food, or something like that.
Ambar: Mm-hmm. Do you have any ideas or tips for other ways to say, I'm sorry, other ways to acknowledge?
Whitney: Yeah. The biggest thing is stop doing the hurtful thing. I've talked to people like this. I never heard the word, I'm sorry, from my mother, but she stopped criticizing me constantly about this thing after I brought it up to her, and now we can have a better relationship.
Things like that, that if you feel like you can't get the words out or it's just not how you typically show love. Maybe just listening and trying to change your behavior and showing it that way could really change your relationship. The number one thing I hear from people is if they would change their behavior in the present, I could have a relationship with.
Ambar: Wow, that sounds so. It's so simple, but so complicated at the same time. When did you start to notice the shift from your family, being your family to your family, becoming your friends?
Whitney: Oh gosh. I think I noticed a big shift in, in how I felt probably after I had my first child and I was married, that I felt very much like I was my own family now and that.
made me start relating to people in my family differently, I think, and seeing them more in that light than maybe someone who was in charge of me or responsible for me or something. And your parents move into the role of like grandparent, which then creates this different type of arrangement that, that really made me feel like, oh, now I am, I'm in the parent role in a lot of ways.
And it's, it feels different than when I was in more of the child role, even as an adult.
Ambar: I will ask you this. Is there anything that you want listeners to take with them as they think about utilizing friendship as a tool for relating to their relatives and repairing relationships for peace?
Whitney: Mm-hmm. I think we touched on this some earlier, but I think sometimes for people that if you can get the needs for connection and acceptance and all of that from other relationships in your life, sometimes it allows you to. Find some distance between you and your family and also not rely on them for all of your acceptance and nurturing and all of that, and it can make it feel a little bit more palatable to be around them, even if you don't have a ton in common, because you know that you have these other relationships to meet that need, and I think you'll find that sense of inner peace, knowing that even if you can't fully connect with your family, that there's other people out there that see you for who you are and love you for who you are, and that can be just as meaningful.
HOST: That was Correspondent Ambar Wortham speaking with Licensed family therapist, Whitney Goodman, author of Toxic Positivity, and the founder of Calling Home as well as the owner of the Collaborative Counseling Center based in Florida. To learn more about our guests and to listen to past episodes, visit our website@peacetalksradio.com.
There's also a donate button where you can contribute to our nonprofit work. Support comes from listeners like you, as well as the Albuquerque Community Foundation Ties Fund and KUNM at the University of New Mexico. Nola Daves Moses is our executive director, Ali Adelman, composed and performs our theme music for correspondent Ambar Worthham, co-founders Paul Ingles and Suzanne Kryder, I'm Jessica Ticktin. Thanks so much for listening to and for supporting Peace Talks Radio.
