Episode Transcript
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
DEC 18, 2025
How Politics are Driving Families Apart
Speakers
Audie Cornish, Joshua Coleman
Audie Cornish
00:00:00
You being busy is, like, sort of sad.
Joshua Coleman
00:00:03
It kind of is sad. It's true. It is true.
Audie Cornish
00:00:07
I don't want you to be busy. I want your phone not to ring.
Joshua Coleman
00:00:11
I am with you, particularly at this age. But in general. Yeah, I wish this problem would go away.
Audie Cornish
00:00:17
Welcome to the assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. And Joshua Coleman is a psychologist with a very specific specialty, people who cut ties with their families. It's a line of work he sort of stumbled after becoming estranged from his daughter years ago after a divorce, a remarriage, any arrival of new children. His daughter, once she reached her twenties, finally told him how she felt about it all. And then she cut him off.
Audie Cornish
00:00:42
So you've had that experience of being like, no, no, no, no, no explanation, explanation, explanation. So, like, you've been there. You know how visceral that can feel.
Joshua Coleman
00:00:53
Yeah, it's really sh****. I mean, I can swear in your show.
Audie Cornish
00:00:57
I can. It's okay. I've never put a warning on for a psychologist, but now's the time.
Audie Cornish
00:01:06
I spoke with Joshua Coleman earlier this year about the growing number of people hitting the block button online or in real life over politics. We wanted to revisit that conversation for the holidays. A season famous for bringing together family and loved ones who may not share your worldview. And odds are, if you've been at one of those tables, you know how quickly a harmless holiday ketchup can turn into a silent standoff. So why are some people choosing politics over family, and how do generational divides factor into these breaks? And what should you do if you find yourself on either side of an estrangement? Stay with us.
Audie Cornish
00:00:00
When I spoke with Coleman in January, I wanted to know what political estrangement actually looks like. Is it just blocking people on social media? Because if we're being honest, that didn't sound too bad to me.
Joshua Coleman
00:03:04
Well, yeah, a lot of the parents that I work with, they're not only social media, it's also cell phone. It's the ability to text the child. I've had grandparents drop off Halloween packages or things at the front door and then get a very angry letter that you're crossing my boundaries. And if you do it again, I'm going to file a restraining order against you. And these are not crazy abusive parents or grandparents, their parents who have had political differences with their child, their child has set a limit that they don't want to have them in their lives. And and so they're really exacting that limit in a very dramatic way as far as I'm concerned.
Audie Cornish
00:03:37
What other aspect have you come to understand about what it's like for these people to try and mend the relationships? Do they even feel that's possible by the time they're done working with you?
Joshua Coleman
00:03:49
Well, some do, some don't. It depends on how receptive the adult child is. So I always had parents start by writing a letter of amends to the adult child where they start out by saying, I know you wouldn't cut off contact with me unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do. And the parent might not feel like it's the healthiest thing for the child to do. But that's what the child feels.
Audie Cornish
00:04:11
What's it like trying to convince those parents to write that sentence, though? Right? Like, if fundamentally they're like, I didn't do anything wrong and these kids are crazy. You're asking them to do something right that like and then if it comes off as hollow, it backfires. So are you actually trying to convince them of this or have you just like adopted a certain language that you know can be effective?
Joshua Coleman
00:04:28
Well, I come from the perspective of separate realities, and that's what I tell the parent, that you can credibly feel like you were a good parent and raised your child with opportunities that you wish somebody had given you and your child could reasonably feel like you missed something different, that they wish you had done something different. And sort of getting into the rightness and the wrongness of it is always going to be a fool's errand. You're never going to get your child back if you do that. There's always something there worth empathizing with, and the goal is to find the kernel of truth, if not the bushel of truth, to the child's complaints and to be kind of wedded to that. And if you don't understand and many of these parents start to say, well, it's clear that I have blind spots that I don't have a better understanding of why you need to do this. So what I always tell parents is, look, this is about humility. It's not about humiliation. My my goal isn't to make you prostrate stuff in front of your child and say you were a terrible parent or a terrible person. But you have to find a way to to see why your child is doing what they're doing or you're never going to get anywhere. And to your point, some parents can't go there and won't go there. And I'd say, well, I probably can't help you then, because this is the most fundamental basic point of entry.
Audie Cornish
00:05:33
One of the reasons why I'm asking you this is because you describe the idea of being defensive during your own arrangement. Right. So you've had that that experience of being like, no, no, no, no, no explanation, explanation, explanation. Right. So like, you've been there. You know how visceral that can feel.
Joshua Coleman
00:05:50
Yeah, it's really sh****. I mean, I can swear on your show.
Audie Cornish
00:05:54
You can. It's okay. But, I mean, I'm glad you said it that way, because I just. You know, one of the things about being a parent and I'm a parent to a very small child is literally you're spending decades being the person who is right.
Joshua Coleman
00:06:20
Right.
Audie Cornish
00:06:20
Eat this snack now. Eat this kind of snack. Eat it like everything is around you, ushering them into personhood. And the idea that like once they come into that personhood and they look at you and say, Actually, you really messed me up in a lot of ways, you know? And yeah, like I feel like that defensiveness is so deeply ingrained.
Joshua Coleman
00:06:40
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:06:40
In older relatives.
Joshua Coleman
00:06:42
Yeah. It's human nature, particularly for any.
Audie Cornish
00:06:45
Compounded by politics.
Joshua Coleman
00:06:47
Well, right. Yeah. Which which for a lot of the parents feel like particularly of older generations feel like politics really going to cut me off over that. You know, I didn't abuse you. I gave you a good, decent, loving childhood. And you have had opportunities I've never had. And you're going to cut me off because I voted for the party that you didn't that you didn't like. But yeah, no, it's it's humiliating for a parent to hear from their adult child. You failed me. You hurt me, you neglected me, you traumatized me, you emotionally abused me. And part of it has to do with the language of therapy. It empowers the younger generation to make claims about their childhood or who the parent is in ways that are very hard for the parent to completely defend themselves against.
Audie Cornish
00:07:25
All right. So I went swimming in the Reddit's to find the flip side of all those young people and put. Particular who said, I've cut my parent out of my life. There's the world of that, which is like my parent's a narcissist. My parent has actually been emotionally abusive to me in ways that they will not acknowledge for a variety of reasons. Culturally, they may not have noticed, and that's what they experience. And then there is this world creeping in there about political ideology. The reason why I want to bring this up is because you, right, by definition, are hearing on one side of the couch. So, for example, let's say with you and your daughter in another time many decades past.
Joshua Coleman
00:08:12
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:08:13
She would have gone through her whole life and not said anything to you. Right. Because you're the father. Yeah. Right. And her place in your family dynamic wasn't hers to discuss with you.
Joshua Coleman
00:08:24
Right.
Audie Cornish
00:08:25
That was part of our society. Right? Where women were in that conversation. And you were perfectly within your your right to be dismissive, defensive, uninterested in how the family is shaped. So in this new dynamic, she could do that. She could have that conversation with you.
Joshua Coleman
00:08:43
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:08:44
As it applies to politics, I wonder if there's something similar. Meaning you can now, pause, have the language to approach a parent and say, you know, when you use that term or that slur or express this idea. Values wise, this doesn't work for me, right? Like, and they can approach them in a way that just wasn't possible before.
Joshua Coleman
00:09:10
I think that's absolutely true. I think that the younger generations are more having more therapy than more steeped in therapeutic narratives, and also that families have become much more. Children just have more power to give feedback to their parents than, say, I might have given to my parents at a at a similar age. And perhaps you as well.
Audie Cornish
00:09:30
And they have more inputs. Right? Like you don't actually have to be on a college campus to for instance take in language about current events and politics.
Joshua Coleman
00:09:40
Right.
Audie Cornish
00:09:41
And that you can then be on a level conversation with your parent that in the past you could not when like dad came home and held the newspaper or like took it with him on the train like you're in the world. In this in a more fuller capacity, you have more tools to have a conversation with them.
Joshua Coleman
00:10:03
Right. And I think that's the good news of this moment. I see this as a good news bad news. The good news of this moment is that younger generations are more equipped both through therapy and the language of therapy and social media in all the various ways to get information to approach their parent and have a conversation that's more based on a more among equals in ways that earlier generations couldn't have. And I think that it's also an opportunity to have a much more close, intimate relationship than, say, earlier generations might have had.
Audie Cornish
00:10:33
And are ready for. Right. Because if someone comes at you and you're like, well, we're but we're not equals.
Joshua Coleman
00:10:38
Well, right.
Audie Cornish
00:10:38
You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it feels like that is that point of tension you mentioned earlier.
Joshua Coleman
00:10:43
That is the biggest point of tension that older generations don't... Haven't really gotten the message quite yet that using the older language that "you have to respect me" and "you owe me" and "this is your duty to me" and "this is the way that you show your respect for me" that doesn't sail anymore. Younger generations basically aren't having that, and they're calling that emotional abuse, which is even more mystifying to the parents. So yes, in politics, adult children are much more empowered to be able to say, well, I don't share your values and the people that you like that you vote for. You may just say that you always vote Republican. But to me, this guy's a fascist and I won't have him in my house and I won't have him be around my children. Ideally, people have these conversations in a more respectful, calm way. They often don't go that way, not only outside of families, but within families. But ideally, you can have a conversation with anybody if it's come from a position of respect.
Audie Cornish
00:11:40
Psychologist Joshua Coleman is my guest. We're going to take a quick break. Back in a minute.
Audie Cornish
00:11:47
One of the things I've often wrestled with is there are generational shifts in social mores and in values, right? Like how we treat black Americans is different. How we treat gay Americans is different. Yeah. And that families can be caught in those shifts. If especially if kids speak up. How do you talk about that in a family dynamic? Because I think about maybe interracial couples, which was legalized in, what, 1967, 1968 with the Loving case. Those were there were a lot of families that had conversations that were like, you're not seeing these grandkids.
Joshua Coleman
00:12:23
Right.
Audie Cornish
00:12:23
And I look back and think they were right. You know, they made like, it's hard for me to have sympathy thinking of these stories. And over and over again, as I read into this, there were a lot of young people, especially around LGBT issues, racial issues. They did feel like it wasn't just a value thing. They felt like that the kinds of things their parents were still casual about were like actually fundamentally immoral in some ways. And that feels. Help me understand. Like, what do you even advise? How do you think about that?
Joshua Coleman
00:13:00
Yeah, I kind of share that. I mean, I have one of my sons is gay, and I was thinking my parents were very supportive when he came out. He's an adult now. But I was thinking the other day... Well, if they hadn't been. You know, if they had been really critical of him... If if like every time he was over they said something hostile or whatever?
Audie Cornish
00:13:17
Or something they didn't think was hostile...
Joshua Coleman
00:13:19
Well, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:13:20
But is.
Joshua Coleman
00:13:20
'But it is. Yeah. Or just incredibly insensitive. It would have been harder for me to support him spending time around them or me even bringing him around them, if that's what they were going to do. But I would hope that I would have been able to take some time to try to educate them and get them kind of up to speed because I think a certain you know, there's a certain amount of kind of naivete that it isn't always just hate that animates these conversations. Sometimes it's just people need to be educated and people are better educated through a kind approach initially. Now, maybe that won't work. Not everybody's persuaded. I would hope that I could would be very provocative. If you have a child and your parents are taking a perspective that you know is very hurtful to them and their identity and self-esteem, I would hope that I could start out from a position of calmness and kindness to try to educate them. Because I think that's the only way anybody gets educated. People don't get educated through contempt and anger and and criticism.
Audie Cornish
00:14:18
Then what's the kind of mental checklist you have for when when do I need to actually step away from my relative? Yeah, especially around these kinds of things we're talking about. Right? Those little actions that are undermining your values. This is kind of the flip side, right of the conversation we had earlier. Like, do you actually think about what...yeah... What goes into that decision? What should go into that decision?
Joshua Coleman
00:14:49
Yeah. Now, I think about it a lot because the adult children in my practice who are considering that we have to sort of go through it, due diligence has to be done on both sides.
Audie Cornish
00:14:59
What does that mean, though, for a normal person is that like extra pancakes, is that right? So you're sitting down with them and you're like, let's let's actually break this down before you make this decision. Have you A, B and C? What are the A, B and C?
Joshua Coleman
00:15:12
'Yeah, A, B and C are you approach the parent and you say, look, I want to have a conversation with you. You know, there's a lot of things about you as a parent that I like or value or that you've contributed to my well-being around. But I need you to know that there's something in the way that you communicate that I find really hurtful and offensive and problematic, and I need you to work on that. And I need you to be committed to working on it. And can I give you some feedback about that? You know, if you have an old school parent, they may go, No, you can't give me feedback about what are you talking about? And say, well, look, I actually need to have the freedom to do that...
Audie Cornish
00:15:44
It sounds like you're hearing from HR. And I'm not picking on you, but do you know what I mean? Like, I could feel some parents listening to this and cringing like your kid coming to you basically kind of like we need to have a conversation about your communication style.
Joshua Coleman
00:16:00
Well, I mean, there are only so many ways to have a good conversation. And so...
Audie Cornish
00:16:04
But those are also political terms now problematic.
Joshua Coleman
00:16:07
Right. Sure.
Audie Cornish
00:16:08
That is considered a wokeism, you know what I mean? Like, so it feels like that political conversation is hard. Sorry, I keep interrupting.
Joshua Coleman
00:16:15
No, it's okay. No, it's important. Yeah, the political conversations are probably the most difficult, but you could just say, look, when you talk like this, it makes me not want to spend time around you. That we have really different values around this. I understand you came to your your position because of your life experiences. I've come to it around mine and I really need you to talk to me about it in a different way. And if particularly around my child, I talk to my children about it in a different way and then, you know, give them some time to work on it, meaning I don't think it should just be one conversation, particularly if it's with a parent or grandparent, if it keeps happening to say, Look, this keeps happening. I feel like my request is very reasonable, it's very basic, and if you can't abide by it, it's going to make it harder for me to spend time around you or bring my children around you. So is this something that you're willing to do? If you're not willing to do it, then it makes it harder for me to feel like I want to spend time around you. And then you may actually have to set the limit of saying, okay, well, I'm just actually not going to come over for the next three months or something, and I want you to think about it. I mean, ideally you might as the adult child, offer to do family therapy with them to work on it. If you have to have more of a supportive conversation around it. So those are some of the steps that I would take.
Audie Cornish
00:17:27
It's interesting, again, thinking of this in the context of politics, right? Instead of like, well, we have this family dynamic. We're working through it. I feel like some people receive that kind of comment. What you've described as like nonsense. Like I said, just like wokeism, like they can't tell me how to think is how they receive it.
Joshua Coleman
00:17:47
Right. Well, that's why you have to put into the context of your own feelings about them and the relationship. You could say, look, you get to have your own beliefs about whatever, but what you communicate to me, I actually do get a say over I do get a say over how you communicate to me or communicate around my children if you want to communicate about this with other people. I guess I have no control over that. But if you're going to be around me and my children, you need... I don't I'm not going to feel comfortable if you start using this kind of language around me.
Audie Cornish
00:18:19
What's your advice going forward? What's your advice to those people who are looking around and saying, I'm blocking all these family members like I'm done here? If they would vote for this person or that person, that makes no sense to me? How do you want people to think about it before they reach for the block button, before they decide that that's like one post two far.
Joshua Coleman
00:19:12
Well, you know, I guess I wish that we had a bigger embrace of the other aspects of family beyond politics. I don't think that that our particular moment or politics has become such a powerful form of identity is actually the right kind of place to land in terms of thinking about whether or not to keep somebody in your life.
Audie Cornish
00:19:37
Yeah. Especially if you like... Do you consider politics and values synonymous?
Joshua Coleman
00:19:42
Well, right, exactly. And they're and they're they don't have to be so synonymous. Somebody can be a good person and still vote for the person that you actually hate. They can also still contribute a lot of value to you and your life and your children and the rest of your family, even if you hate their values. And just because they vote for that person doesn't mean that they embrace every single thing about them.
Audie Cornish
00:20:02
What toll can it take on the person doing the estranging, so to speak, who cuts people off? Because a decision you you make can have reverberations in other ways down the road. And how have you heard it?
Joshua Coleman
00:20:16
Well, the older I get, the more I'm hearing from estranged adult children. His parents are now dead and they're regretting it. So I don't know that every person who's estranging a parent will regret it, but clearly some will. So I think you have to think about what the life course is going to be like for you. And, you know, we're living in a moment where we have rising rates of mental illness, social isolation and rising rates of loneliness and friendlessness.
Audie Cornish
00:20:40
Right. Surgeon general describes it as an epidemic, right?
Joshua Coleman
00:20:44
It's an epidemic. And it's partly because we become so preoccupied with our own boundaries and our own values and our own identities and our own pursuing of our mental health that first of all, we're not really recognizing the damage that we do when we cut out other people who still love us and are committed to us. But we're also cutting ourselves off from people who can still bring a lot of value and meaning and mattering to our own lives. And, you know, the research on pursuing happiness in this highly individualistic way that we do it here actually doesn't typically lead to happiness or typically leads to more unhappiness because it involves a much more kind of self centered approach to happiness.
Audie Cornish
00:21:22
Joshua, is there any kind of final thought? You want to leave with us? You've been doing a lot of interviews and I don't know if there's something you wish people would talk about that they don't, or something you've thought about more as this research has come out.
Joshua Coleman
00:21:36
I mean, the thing that I think the most about as a psychologist is that my field, as much as it does a good job of helping people and helping families in this moment. I think that we're failing a lot of families because we're so preoccupied with the person who's sitting in front of us that we're not thinking about the family as a system and how much people are getting hurt by it. We've become what one sociologist calls detachment brokers, meaning we help people detach from the feelings of responsibility or duty or obligation or gratitude that earlier generations took for granted. So my call out is for my fellow colleagues to become more thoughtful and more mindful about the way that we might encourage those arrangements.
Audie Cornish
00:22:21
Joshua Coleman, thank you so much for exploring this with us. We really appreciate you.
Joshua Coleman
00:22:26
Oh, thank you.
Audie Cornish
00:22:27
Joshua Coleman is a psychologist and a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. He's the author of the book "Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict." And in case you were wondering, he and his daughter reconciled and now have a close relationship. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, share, and review. It makes a difference.
