Episode 203: I speak with Harriet Brown about family relationships and why, sometimes, estrangement can be the healthiest option. We also discuss attachment and conditional versus unconditional parenting, and how experiences in early life have a huge impact on someone’s sense of self and self-esteem for the rest of their life.
Harriet Brown is a Professor of Magazine, News, & Digital Journalism at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and a sought-after speaker on college campuses around the country. She has written for the New York Times Science section, the New York Times Magazine, Vice, Psychology Today, and other publications.
Her most recent book is Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement (Da Capo, 2018). She has also written Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do About It (Da Capo, 2015) and Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia. In 2011 she won the University of Iowa’s John F. Murray Prize in Strategic Communications for the Public Good, for her work as an advocate for those with eating disorders.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 203 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode in the show notes, which is at seven-health.com/203.
Seven Health is currently taking on new clients. We specialize in helping you overcome disordered eating, body dissatisfaction and negative body image, regaining your periods, balancing hormones, and recovering from years of dieting by learning how to listen to your body. If you’re ready to put an end to these struggles and heal your relationship with food and with your body, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I’ve included this in the show notes as well.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel.
This week on the show, I’m back with a guest interview, and my guest today is Harriet Brown. Harriet is a professor of Magazine, News, and Digital Journalism at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a sought-after speaker on college campuses around the country. She has written for the New York Times science section, the New York Times Magazine, Vice, Psychology Today, and other publications.
Her most recent book is Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement. She’s also written Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight and What You Can Do about It and Brave Girl Eating: A Family Struggle with Anorexia. In 2011, she won the University of Iowa’s John F. Murray Prize in Strategic Communications for Public Good for her work as an advocate for those with eating disorders.
I first became aware of Harriet back in 2015 when I read her book, Brave Girl Eating. It was a memoir about her daughter Kitty developing an eating disorder and the family-based treatment that they used as part of her recovery. Harriet really does have a way with words, and it was a very honest account of what it was like and the toll that it took on the family and how each of them were able to get through it.
But for this week’s show, our conversation is about Harriet’s most recent book called Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement. This was a book that was recommended to me by Lu, the other practitioner here at Seven Health. A while back, I had a week where I had a succession of clients where with each one of them, we’d had a conversation about difficult relationships within their family, but mostly with their mothers, and where these difficulties had gone on for a really long time, going back as long as they could remember, and it was at the heart of how they saw themselves and thought about themselves and was very much connected to their difficulties in recovery.
I messaged Lu and asked did she have any favorite books or resources in this area, and in typical Lu form, I received a ton of wonderful resources and writing exercises and YouTube videos and book recommendations, and Shadow Daughter was one of those books.
I found it fascinating and enlightening but also very upsetting and frustrating – and not because of Harriet’s writing; she is a terrific author and writer – but because of what she was sharing about her own life and the lives of people that she interviewed for the book.
So that is what this episode is about: that family relationships can be fraught with difficulties and that for many people, this reaches a point where it’s actually better for them not to have that person or those people in their life. Despite this, there is still a lot of stigma around becoming estranged from family, so even if it is this ultimate act of self-care, it’s not always, or not even often, seen that way by others.
We talk about that, about the stigma associated with it. We talk about Harriet’s experience in her life and how that looked. We talk about attachment and conditional versus unconditional parenting and how experiences in early life have a huge impact on how someone has a sense of self and self-esteem for really the rest of their life. We talk about that concept of forgiveness and what this actually means, and all the exploration that Harriet has done in this area and some of the resources that she turned to as part of this, and we have a real conversation around what it means to forgive someone and who that is really for and what the ultimate goal with forgiveness is.
This is by no means a light conversation, but equally I think it is a really important one because this is something that does affect many people, and probably more people than we would imagine because of it still being taboo and something that’s not really talked about. In the area of eating disorders and the client population that I see, it seems to be more common than the population at large.
I’m really glad that Harriet came on the show and we were able to have this conversation. I will be back at the end with a recommendation for you, but for now, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Harriet Brown.
Hey, Harriet. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Harriet Brown: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Sandel: I’m really excited about this conversation. You’ve written a number of books, but for today I really want to focus on your most recent one, called Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement. It’s a book that’s been very timely for me as I’ve been seeing it play out a lot for many clients that I work with. So in our time together, I just want to focus and explore this topic. Naturally, being a conversation, we can just see wherever it leads as well.
Harriet Brown: Sure.
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Chris Sandel: As a starting place, do you want to introduce yourself an give a bio of sorts, like who you are and what you do?
Harriet Brown: I am a writer. I also have been a journalist, and I am a Professor of Journalism at Syracuse University. In my writing, I have often focused on issues around food and eating and body image, and this latest book is about family estrangement. It grew out of my own experience with my family of origin and my relationship with my mother that wound up in a place of total no-contact estrangement for a couple years before she died.
That had always been such a painful subject for me that I decided I would go talk to a lot of other people who had had that experience and go look at the research. Going down that rabbit hole, which is what we writers love to do.
Chris Sandel: How long had you been thinking about writing about this as a topic? Did you have to get to a point where you could even write about it as a topic?
Harriet Brown: Oh my gosh, yes. I had been wanting to write about it probably for 20 years. I knew that I would not be able to write about it until if and when my mother died before me. She died in 2011, and I just knew I wasn’t ready. It took me another 5 or 6 years before I thought, okay, now I’m ready. You have to get a certain amount of emotional distance to process everything. But I always wanted to write about it, mostly because there’s so many misconceptions about estrangement. Why do people get estranged, and what does that mean? There’s a lot of social stigma around estrangement. So yeah, I knew it was something I wanted to dive into, for sure.
Chris Sandel: All those things you mentioned there are things I want to touch on today. Maybe a good place to start is just defining estrangement, because I know we’re going to use that term again and again throughout this conversation, just so listeners understand what that means.
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Harriet Brown: What a good place to start. I think a lot of people think estrangement means absolutely no contact, but in fact, one of the researchers I talked to in writing this book said think of it more as a continuum, which I think makes a lot of sense. You can be anywhere on that continuum from “Gosh, I try to talk to my family as little as possible, I try to only see them the bare minimum, I try not to get into anything significant or emotional with them.” You can be all the way from that all the way up to no contact at all, no talking, blocking them on all social media. And you can be anywhere in between.
I think most people who wind up being estranged or describing themselves as estranged bounce around that continuum for many years because nobody starts there. We all start with this idea of a family. We want to be close to our families. We want to love them and be loved by them.
But when there are problems that are unresolvable over a long period of time, most people do what I wound up doing, which was I would try – and my mother would try, too, to give her credit. We would try, but I think because we never were doing anything different, we would always wind up in the same place and then we’d have a big fight, and then we wouldn’t talk for a while and then we’d try again. Researchers call this a pattern of chaotic dissociation, which really describes it very well because it is very chaotic. You never know where you are in the process, and it’s pretty distressing.
I think partly because there’s so many imperatives in our culture to be with family, to work things out, to resolve problems, it takes a lot to make people really estrange, and there’s a lot of stigma around it, which I know we’ll talk about here too.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Did you find any decent statistics on this in terms of how common it is? I don’t even know how you would ask that as a survey, but are there any stats?
Harriet Brown: There was one survey done in the UK. It is a really hard thing to get at, partly because people define it so many different ways. But the consensus seems to be that it’s more common than you think, whatever that means, whatever one thinks, and that especially if you think of it as that continuum, it probably affects 10-15% of families, let’s say, in some way. But yeah, there’s not really good stats on it.
Chris Sandel: If I’m thinking about within my own life, there is estrangement within our family. I never met my mum’s dad, or if I did, I was a baby and I don’t remember it. He was an alcoholic, and when my mum was old enough – I don’t know at what point she cut him out of her life. I definitely have had conversations about her and what her life was like growing up and the toll her dad’s drinking and also her mum’s mental health issues had on her. I know as soon as she was old enough to be able to leave the house and start a life on her own, she did that.
Then with my partner, Ali, she has a brother she hasn’t spoken to in nearly 4 years. Ali moved from Scotland to London and lives in the UK, and a big part of this is a difficult family life.
I just wanted to say all of that up front because even prior to reading your book, I was under no illusion about the supposed sacredness of family and that we need to learn to forgive and forget. I’m a firm believer that estrangement can be one of the biggest acts of self-care that someone can make. I want to mention this because I want to say reading your book was confirmation bias, and I want to get that bias out in front just to say I’m very much pro-estrangement in the right circumstances, and I don’t believe just because family is family, you’ve got to keep trying to make it work forever and forevermore.
Harriet Brown: Yeah. A big part of the reason why I wrote the book was to convey exactly that. It’s not that I’m out there advocating everyone, the minute you have a disagreement with a family member, you should stop talking to them. Not at all.
But for me, and for pretty much even I interviewed for this book, estrangement was the hugest gift. When I asked people, “Do you have any regrets?”, pretty much everyone said, “I regret I didn’t do this 10 or 15 or 20 years earlier, go no-contact.” Some relationships just are toxic, as you said, and cannot be mended.
I’m interested that you mentioned alcoholism, you mentioned mental health issues. Those are two of the biggest elements – I’m sure we’ll get into talking about that – about why people wind up in an estranged situation.
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Chris Sandel: Do you want to describe a little bit more about your situation? Talk about your childhood, maybe some of the memories that stick out the most in connection to this situation?
Harriet Brown: For me, I honestly don’t ever remember a time when I felt safe with my mother or loved by her. But we looked great as a family. It wasn’t a situation of overt abuse or poverty or anything like that. We looked like a middle class family in New Jersey in the 1970s. My parents were together. They took care of my sister and me. We had clothes. We had a place to live. We had more than the basics, for sure.
But my mother and I – I’ve thought so much about it. I think we were not a good fit, which I also think is a factor for a lot of people. As a parent myself, I know that you have to let go of your expectations of your children to a large extent, accept that they are who they are and they might not be whatever, the kid you wanted, but you love them anyway. I know my mother loved me in some way, but from as long as I can remember, she was highly critical. She was mean. [laughs] There’s really no other word for it. She was very blaming and mean.
To be fair, I think there were mental health issues, and I think she’d had a very tough childhood herself that left her with a lot of scars that she couldn’t or wouldn’t address. We fought a lot, but it was different than the fighting that other people seem to have with their families. We never made any progress in working through anything.
My mother could be just very mean. I remember quite a few things that she had said to me over the years – and obviously everyone says things sometimes that they regret, but for her it was a pattern of saying the meanest possible thing at the worst possible moment.
There’s a story that I mention in the book that’s actually something she did to my sister, not to me. When my sister had done a year of college and it hadn’t worked out, she was home living temporarily, she was working, and she had this routine where she’d come home every night and make herself a bowl of ice cream and sit down and watch TV and unwind from her day. One night she did that, she went and got everything ready and opened this new carton of ice cream, and it was filled with garbage. There was a note on there from our mother saying, “Ha ha! Gotcha.” It was that kind of thing.
There was this pattern of disturbing – I think of it as emotional abuse. Where the rubber hit the road for me was when I had children myself and I began to see that it’s one thing for me to deal with this stuff, but now you’re doing it to my kids? I can’t have that. That’s not okay. Then it became clear to me that it was abuse.
So many people I’ve talked to for this book had similar narratives, like, “Okay, this was my relationship with this person, but then, whoa, they started doing it to my children and I went into a totally different mode with it.”
Chris Sandel: I think that human tendency to be able to solve other people’s problems and not necessarily solve your own, and then when you see that playing out with one of your children, you’re like, “Okay, now this is definitely not right.”
Harriet Brown: Yes, you can see that boundary crossing much more clearly when it’s – another story from the book is I was visiting my parents when my oldest daughter was like 3 weeks old. She was super colicky. I don’t even remember why I was there without my husband, but I was there and my mother really, really wanted to be a grandmother. She was like, “Why don’t you take a nap or go for a walk or something? I’ll take care of the baby.” I was still in the mode of “I’m going to give her a chance. Maybe this is going to change things.”
“Okay, here’s the baby, but she’s super colicky. She cries a lot. You have to hold her all the time.” “Oh sure,” my mother said. “No problem.” So I went upstairs to get ready to go out for a walk. Then I hear the baby crying, crying, crying – which wasn’t that unusual. But when I went downstairs, I saw my 3-week-old daughter was lying on the floor, by herself in the middle of the rug, screaming and crying. My mother was in the kitchen just putzing around.
I said, “Mom, what are you doing?” It wasn’t like she had to put her down for a second. She wasn’t really doing anything. She was like, “Oh, she has to learn that she can’t always get what she wants.” [laughs] I was like, “Okay, I’m out. That’s it. This is not really salvageable right here.” It was that kind of thing.
Chris Sandel: You made reference to your sister there. What was the relationship like with your sister, and how does she see it? I know you make reference in the book to often with situations like this, there can be a golden child. Did she fit that mold? Did she escape a lot of what it feels like you suffered with?
Harriet Brown: Yes. That whole “golden child” thing is something that people talk about in the context of relationships with a narcissist, which I think my mother probably was a narcissist. There’s one golden child and then other scapegoat-y kind of kids.
In our family, it was a little odd. My sister was the golden child, but it was partly because she had had a pretty rough start in life. I think my mother felt needed by her in a different way. I think part of what she didn’t like about me was that I was always very independent. She couldn’t handle that. So yeah, she certainly did some crappy things to my sister, but nothing like what happened between us.
That’s also very common and it’s also very painful for people because you look at this other relationship and you’re like “It must be me. Why is it so bad with me? It must be something I’m doing. What can I do differently?” But someone – I can’t remember who – once said that every child in a family grows up with different parents. Every relationship is different. I think that’s true.
Chris Sandel: That’s definitely one of the things that has come up a lot with clients that I work with and can be so painful, around the fact that a different child had a very different relationship with their parents and they don’t really understand why, and that can often lead to a lot of the blaming of “Okay, maybe it’s my fault.”
When I was reading through, you talked about how much this was always framed as if it was your problem and your fault, and if you were behaving differently, it would be very different. If that’s how you are experiencing the first however many years of your life, it’s very easy for that to then become your narrative for all of your life.
Harriet Brown: Exactly. There’s truth in it, too, in the sense that – my husband, when we first got together, he was still in a mode of trying to fix things between my mother and me. He would say, “What if you just let her comments roll right off you? Like, she’s an idiot, she’s mean, whatever. Just let it go.” Obviously that’s a really complicated question with an even more complicated answer. We can’t do that because there are so many things wrapped up in it.
But to some extent, my sister let some of that stuff go. But more than that, I think there’s a fundamental – I think kids will forgive parents an awful lot if there’s a baseline sense of being loved and accepted, no matter what issues and conflicts there are on top of that. For whatever reason, my sister had that sense with our mother and I never, ever did. My mother definitely framed that as my problem. “What’s wrong with you? You’re unable to love anybody. You’re selfish. You’re mean. You’re impossible.” I really believed that about myself for a very long time.
Chris Sandel: When was it that that started to change? How old were you before you realized maybe there’s something wrong with your mother as opposed to it just being all you?
Harriet Brown: Ooh, good question. Honestly, I think I always knew there was something wrong with her, but when I started to really feel like, “Wait, maybe it’s not me 100% responsible for this issue,” I was well into adulthood. I was in my thirties or even early forties before I got there. It took really, really good therapy to get me started on seeing things a little differently.
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Chris Sandel: One of the things you made reference to is possibly your mother was a narcissist. I think narcissism, thanks to the tireless work of Donald Trump, has become a word that has been making it into headlines and into people’s vocabulary a lot in the last 4 years. But while it’s used a lot, I’m not sure that everyone knows exactly what it means. Are you able to describe what narcissism is or some of the traits that categorize a narcissist?
Harriet Brown: I’ll give it a shot, and then maybe you can weigh in as more of the professional here. My understanding of narcissism is that a narcissist really doesn’t see other people as full human beings, is very bound up in their own neediness and their own – obviously, we’re all the hero of our own story. You have to be, to be a human being.
But I think my mother lacked empathy, altruism, anything like that. Everything was about her, all the time, 100% of the time. It’s funny you mention Donald Trump, because I think like a lot of people in my position, his presidency has been horrible for me not just because of objective things, but because it’s like all the same things that used to happen with my mother. Everything’s about him. Every conversation or press conference he tries to give always winds up being about how great he is. It was just like that with my mother.
So yeah, I don’t know. What’s your take as the professional here?
Chris Sandel: I don’t have a huge amount of real solid research around this; it’s stuff that I’ve been reading on. But it was interesting when you talked about your sister and her having the more difficult starting life and how maybe that helped her with your mom, because one of the things when reading around narcissism is this real excessive need to be loved or to be the focus of attention. I guess if your sister was in that much need, that could’ve helped her to fill that void that your mother was after – or at least, fill it more than you were able to provide.
Harriet Brown: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. For some people, they need adulation in a certain way, and other people need to be needed. Again, we all have that to some extent, but when it is so – I always felt about my mother that there was a huge empty hole in her, and she wanted me to fill it in some way. I knew that even as a really small child. I also knew that I couldn’t. I think that’s a pretty common trait for narcissists.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It was also interesting – I’m a huge fan of Alfie Kohn and I’ve read a number of his books, and I listened to him doing the Audible version of Unconditional Parneting, which is amazing. Just for you to know, I’ve got a 2-½-year-old son, so I was doing a lot of this reading and research before he was born and in his early years because I really want to try and give him the best support and start that I can.
Alfie Kohn’s research and his writing and point of view really resonated with me. He talks about most parents, or maybe even all parents, would say that they unconditionally love their children, but it’s not about what the parents say; it’s about what the children feel, and how a child would feel in terms of “What is the love that I’m getting from my parents? Is it unconditional or unconditional?”
Harriet Brown: Yes. I read that book as part of my research for my own book, and it resonated with me too.
To some extent, that also echoes another conversation that comes up a lot in this subject – I’ve even talked to a lot of professionals who will say, “Estrangement is bad unless there’s really extreme abuse in a family.” Then that can take you down a rabbit hole of, how do you define abuse? Hitting, physical abuse, or sexual abuse are tangible and you can say “this happened” or “this didn’t happen,” whatever. But emotional abuse is very different, and kind of like unconditional love, I think the only person who can really define “this has been an abusive situation” is the person on the receiving end.
I talked with some parents – a lot of times this estrangement conversation is about adult children talking about their own parents, so I did try to talk with some of the parents who had been estranged to get their perspective. I went on a bunch of forums where people talk about these things and talked with a couple of experts on it, and it’s interesting because a lot of that conversation will be, “What I did wasn’t abusive. That was how I was raised” or “Life is tough and I’m just preparing you for it” or whatever.
So I do believe that sometimes there can be this big disconnect between what a parent thinks they’re doing and what the child experiences – but I guess most of the time, I have personally had to learn to trust my feelings and my responses to situations, and I think – again, because kids are so hardwired to love their parents and want their approval. It kind of takes a lot to make a kid feel like they’ve been emotionally abused. I think there’s probably almost always truth to that.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It was interesting when I was reading those sections of the book as well where you would quote parents from different forums where there was almost this feeling of “I don’t know why I’ve been estranged,” and the arguments for why they shouldn’t be were always like “I gave the kids all this money” or “We took them on holidays” or “They had all the best toys.” It seemed to be missing the part of what a child is really after, which is the attention and the support and the nurturing component to it, not the things.
Harriet Brown: Yes. And the unconditional love. I think probably a lot of those parents, including my mother, were just incapable of giving that, so they did the best that they could, maybe, with what they had. They substituted material things for the emotional things that they didn’t have and couldn’t give.
I’ve tried really hard to have compassion for my mother and to not blame her, because I think that blaming cycle just doesn’t get you anywhere. I think that’s one of the things that is positive about estrangement: it can take you out of the blaming cycle. It becomes not so much a discussion of “You did this, and I didn’t like that, and that hurt” and whatever, and it becomes much more of a kind of policy discussion, like “Here’s my boundary. That’s just how it’s going to be. I can say that with compassion for you, but it’s what I have to do to take care of myself.”
Humans, we’re messed up. [laughs] We all have things that we don’t do well, and we have needs. But ultimately, I think it is your right and your responsibility to take care of yourself and set some boundaries if that’s what you need to do.
Chris Sandel: As I’ve now become a parent and have a 2-½-year-old – and I think you rightfully talk about this in the book – it’s really difficult. There is a huge amount of ambivalence around being a parent in terms of you’ve got this absolute wonderful thing that lights you up and creates so much joy, and then at the other end of that, it’s incredibly hard. There’s times where you’re reflecting like, “Wouldn’t this be a lot easier if I wasn’t in this situation?”
You’re holding those two things at the same time, and maybe it’s even taboo that I’m saying it like that, but I think it is really difficult. Then, as you say, you come in with all of your own stuff. You come in with all of your own potential inabilities to – in the case of your mother, if she’d had an upbringing where none of those things were modeled for her, yeah, it’s not always going to be easy. But that’s not to say that that doesn’t have an impact on the child.
Harriet Brown: That’s right. I think it was Bruno Bettelheim who talked about the “good enough” parent, and although I don’t agree with everything that Bettelheim ever said or wrote, I think there is truth to the idea that because you spend years with your young children, you’re going to make some mistakes. You’re going to do things you regret.
And I think that’s okay. I think that kids, again, respond to that baseline – like my husband and his parents. They definitely had some issues in their family, but somehow he always got that message that he was unconditionally loved, despite the fact that his father was an alcoholic and there were difficulties in the family. But he doesn’t have the same kinds of issues I do, and I think that’s why.
So that whole notion of unconditional love – it’s really, really hard, as you say. It’s so hard to suspend your own needs constantly for the sake of this other person in your life, but it’s also, as we know, very rewarding when you can pull it off. And of course, it’s just what a kid needs.
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Chris Sandel: Yeah. You talked a little bit in the book about the Romanian orphans and the Harlow experiment. Do you want to mention those?
Harriet Brown: Oh, the Harlow experiments, God. They were Harry Harlow and his monkey experiments where they did things like separate infant newborn monkeys from their mothers and then basically try them with a variety of substitute mothers to see – it’s just grim even to talk about it. [laughs] But were these infant monkeys attached to their mothers because they were food sources or because they were objects of affection?
There’s a horrible image of these deprived, freaking-out baby monkeys, clinging to these mother figures made out of clothespins, hard, unyielding, inanimate, and just clutching them because their need for that connection and that attachment was so great that it didn’t matter that they were getting nothing back from this clothespin of a mother.
The research is pretty clear that we have this strong, innate need for attachment and validation. It’s not just we want to be heard and seen, really seen, by a parent figure, but we need that, I think, to develop emotionally properly.
I think, again, unlike many kids in this situation, I was lucky that I did have people in my life who could give that. In that case it was my grandparents, my father’s parents, especially my grandmother. She was capable of unconditional love, and she gave it, and I think that was redemptive for me. If you don’t have anyone like that in your life, I think things turn out pretty differently, which is really hard.
Chris Sandel: I think that’s something I’ve noticed with clients as well. It doesn’t necessarily have to come from your parents, but there needs to be some figure or figures that you have growing up who are able to instill that. If you haven’t had this feeling of “I’m unconditionally loveable” when you’re young, it is incredibly difficult to rectify that because even when someone can rationally start to understand it, that’s a very different situation to feeling it at your core.
Harriet Brown: Yes, I think that’s right. You never really feel it if you don’t get it. I was lucky that I got it from my grandmother, but even so – I’ve made my peace with the fact that there’s always going to be a piece of me that feels like I’m damaged, flawed, like “What’s wrong with you? There’s something really wrong with you.”
Luckily I have this other experience and voice to balance that out, and I feel really deep empathy for people who don’t get that at all, because I don’t think you can overcome it later. We’re programmed so that our early experiences stick with us, and boy, they sure do, don’t they?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and for early experiences that you have no memory of. Stuff going back way before you can even start to analyze any of this thing because it’s just there, and it’s in your being.
It’s one of those things that – I reflect on my own life and how fortunate I have been in that regard, and it’s just complete dumb luck. I have done nothing to earn the level of self-esteem or of feeling good within myself that I’ve done. It’s just purely because I was raised in the home that I was raised in. It’s not because of any achievements I’ve done or anything along those lines. That’s just the sad situation of how much of this just comes down to luck.
Harriet Brown: Yes, indeed. The good news is that many parents do good enough at this, and that’s great. [laughs] Many people do get the kind of foundation that they need. But not everyone.
Chris Sandel: How was it for you when you did get a chance to leave the house and you were able to go off to college?
Harriet Brown: I basically dropped out of high school and left home at 16 because I couldn’t function in that – I kind of ran away. I dropped out of high school, but I did go to college. I was young and I was in way over my head, and looking back, I can see that I didn’t have a lot of emotional coping skills. But I still think it was the right call because I just don’t think I could’ve lasted in my house any more with that level of drama and conflict and abuse.
I struggled. I struggled in college and I struggled as a young adult. I feel like in some ways it took me quite a long time to get to a place where I could – where maybe other people were when they were 22, I think it took me into my thirties to get there emotionally. But better late than never, right? [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Was writing an anchor for you in terms of “this is something I always know that I’m good at” and that helped to pull you along?
Harriet Brown: For sure. Writing for me, especially when I was a younger, had a very redemptive feel to it, like “this is how I’m going to make sense of the world and it’s how I’m going to communicate with the world,” I think partly because I’d felt so unable to communicate with my mother – and my father, too, for different reasons. I was lucky to know early on that writing was something that fed me and was transcendent for me.
Chris Sandel: I know in the very beginning of the memoir, you talk about the fact that you’re able to remember so much of what happened because you kept journals throughout your life. When you were writing those journals, was it almost like a therapeutic tool that “things aren’t going great today at home, so I’m now doing this writing piece to help deal with that”?
Harriet Brown: Absolutely. It was a way of processing and kind of a way of bearing witness, even if it was just for myself. I think, like a lot of kids who grow up in a difficult home, I don’t have a lot of memories otherwise. I forget a lot of the things that happened.
I’ve had the experience of going back and reading parts of journals and being like, “I don’t remember that happening, and yet clearly it did because I write about it here in great detail.” And I’m not a fiction writer, so I know I wasn’t making it up. [laughs] So I think it can be good just to track it for yourself as well.
00:42:55
Chris Sandel: At what point then did you realize “total estrangement is my best option?”
Harriet Brown: I probably came to that conclusion like a dozen times, but it didn’t really stick until about 3 years before my mother died. There was a triggering incident that honestly wasn’t really that much worse than a lot of other things she had done, but I think because of the work I had done in my life, it was so clear to me that – I wrote about this in the book. It was an interaction that we had over email, actually.
When I read this email that she had sent me, I literally heard a cracking sound, and I thought my house was falling apart. [laughs] Then I thought I was having a stroke or something. I vividly heard this crack. Whereas before that had happened, I had always been in this conflict-ridden like “Oh my God, this is so hard, but I want to make it work, but oh my God, I hate her so much,” and blah, blah, blah – after that, it just like, “Nope, I’m done.”
It was very liberating. Sad, obviously, in a way, but it was literally like I had no more eff’s to give. That was it. Some line was crossed that I – and I never was tempted to heal that. After I made that decision and conveyed it to her as kindly as I could, she tried in a lot of different ways to get me to engage again, and I was never even tempted. I was just like, “I’m sorry, this is over. It’s done. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s over.”
I think it’s really sad that things have to get to that point, but it was also a huge relief. Of the 50 or so people I interviewed for the book, a lot of people described moments like that where it was just like, “That’s it. I don’t know, some line was crossed.”
And I think you have to be ready for that. You have to prepare yourself. You have to be doing a lot of work on yourself. You have to have a certain perspective on what’s happened – and then something breaks and you can’t fix it. And you shouldn’t fix it. It’s just broken.
Chris Sandel: As you say, that must’ve been so liberating because before, there’s this “should I, shouldn’t I?” You’re always second-guessing, whereas when there’s now this moment of clarity like “No, this is the only way,” I can see how freeing that would be.
Harriet Brown: Yes, and especially because – we haven’t talked much yet about the stigma of estrangement. There’s a lot of judgment that comes your way, not just from yourself, but from your friends, other parts of your family, and from the culture at large when you grapple with estrangement. There’s so much pressure to fix things.
I think families that are estranged are very threatening to other families. I think there’s a sense of like, “Wait, if they’re like that, that could happen to us, too,” and it’s very frightening, and people respond to that by putting a lot of social pressure on – I got so many pressuring phone calls and letters and meetings with aunts and uncles and people in the family who had a lot at stake in making this go away.
Again, if you have that sense of clarity, it’s very liberating. It helps you put up your hand to all that and say, “You know what? This is between me and this person, and it’s the way it is, end of story.”
00:49:50
Chris Sandel: When I read that, I was thinking of the way we would think of divorce in the 1930s or ’40s or ’50s and how taboo it was and how much people, no matter how bad the relationship was, would tend to just stay together. And now, if you’re getting divorced, most people’s response isn’t “Come on, you’ve got to give this a go. You said this was going to be for life.” It’s just, “Okay, yep, relationships end in divorce.”
So I’m just wondering, from your perspective, do you think that given another decade or two or three, at some point we will have made the change in terms of how we frame estrangement versus how we’re doing it at the moment?
Harriet Brown: What a good question. It’s a question I haven’t really considered before. I don’t know. I think divorce, you can see why that was threatening from a social perspective. I think this is a million times more threatening, and I honestly don’t know, but maybe. The little bit of data that we have suggests that this is a lot more common than we think. I don’t know.
But of course, there are people who – and I’m sure this was true about divorce, too, as a social phenomenon – there’s many experts wringing their hands and saying, “Oh my God, this is terrible. We don’t want it to get more common. We want families to heal their wounds” and whatever. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. It’s still such a taboo subject.
One of the researchers I talked to told me a funny story, which was she proposed to write her dissertation in grad school about some aspect of estrangement, and her committee members tried to discourage her. They said, “No one will talk about this. You won’t find any people to interview.” She said she was inundated with people who were desperate to talk about this.
But at the same time, they wanted to talk about it in a very one-on-one way, but as a culture, we don’t talk about it. I’m not sure I see that changing any time soon. I don’t know. What do you think?
Chris Sandel: I don’t know – and again, I laid out my biases to start with; my knee-jerk reaction whenever someone would say that they’re estranged would be to think there’s probably a really good reason for this and that they’re better off. So I’ve definitely got a bias in that direction.
But it also made me think of the ACE study, the adverse childhood experiences study. I know before that study ran, they thought that incest happened like one in a million or one in two million homes. That was the official figure of how common they thought it was. Then they did this study, and it was just so much more common than that. There was then this shift of understanding.
Again, maybe because I know this topic well and at the normal layperson level they don’t understand this, but it just made me think these things are a lot more common than people really understand, and again, they’re taboo topics so no one’s bringing them up the way that would maybe demonstrate how often they’re occurring.
I just think that, as you say, even if this is 15% of the population that has some level of this or some incidence of this within the family, that’s a pretty high number. So I don’t know. Are we going to start talking about it more? There’s more people who really start to notice there is some real benefit to doing this. When it’s all in the shadows and no one’s talking about it, people don’t really understand or maybe aren’t connecting the dots in terms of how beneficial this can be, whereas if it starts getting talked about or more people are reading your book – and I think it is.
I read your book and I was like, I’m hoping this is going to be the thing that allows people who are in these kind of relationships to be like, “Hmm, okay, maybe taking a break on this or maybe cutting ties altogether is actually the smart thing to be doing here.”
Harriet Brown: That was definitely one of my goals in writing the book, to help in some small way to push the conversation forward. But it’s a tough conversation, there’s no question about it.
Chris Sandel: Even just if I’m going in the other direction, relationships are looking different now than they did even 10-20 years ago. I haven’t really done a lot of research around polyamory, but it’s coming up a lot more. So I think there’s a lot more exploring different dynamics and challenging status quo around what a relationship looks like. Just to say “Family’s family, we’ve got to make things better because that’s your flesh and blood,” I think there’s going to be a lot more challenge to that because people are breaking down what the social norms have been.
Harriet Brown: Yes, because we don’t need our families in quite the same way to survive. Obviously, we do need our families for all sorts of levels of survival, but I mean, I think we have more options now as human beings. Even a lot of the people I talked to for this book, people who have walked away from their family of origin for whatever reason, pretty much everyone talked in some way about creating a family of choice. You find the people that you feel that connection with, and you become family to each other even though you’re not related by blood.
I think maybe 100 years ago, you didn’t have as many options for doing that, so you were stuck with the hand you were dealt, but for better and for worse, we have more options now. I do think that gives people more freedom to say “This is not what I want in my life” and “This is what I want in my life.”
Chris Sandel: The other thing that I’m thinking of now – and maybe this is going to be different for the UK versus the U.S. – is the way that religion plays out in people’s lives. I grew up in a household where I was baptized Catholic, I went to a religious school, but it was more I went to the school because it was a good education as opposed to because my parents were really into religion.
I’m an atheist; I think most of my friends would also use that same title. So there’s not this big religious underpinning that is at the heart of making decisions and how we see the world, and I think there is so much in so many traditions with religion that talk about the importance of family, and that can make that more of a messy problem to try and extricate yourself from because there’s this other level of connotations about what this means as a religious person, how this is seen by God, etc.
Harriet Brown: Yeah, I totally, totally agree with all of that.
00:54:40
Chris Sandel: I know in the book you talk about how there’s an organization in the UK called Stand Alone. Do you want to talk a little about that? But also, I wanted to find out if there’s organizations like that in other parts of the world.
Harriet Brown: To answer the second half of that first, I have not found any other organizations like that anywhere else. I think it’s pretty unique. It was an organization that was started by a journalist, actually, who – I cannot recall the year, but some years ago, she wrote a piece for The Guardian – I think it was right before Christmas, and she talked about what it was like to be estranged from your family at the holidays, which of course is a big triggering time for a lot of people.
She was blown away by the response. She got I don’t know how many letters from people and emails just saying, “Oh my God, thank you for talking about this.” This inspired her to leave journalism and start this nonprofit, and a lot of what they do, which is so interesting, is they are a support and advocate especially for young adults who don’t have the kind of family support they need to get through school, to get school loans, to get housing, to get a lot of the kinds of social goods that you can more easily get if you’re part of an intact family.
I think that’s pretty much their focus, on helping adolescents and young adults, because a lot of people fall behind at that time if you don’t have that kind of family support. I think the work they do is extraordinary, and I wish we had something like that here in the U.S., for sure.
Chris Sandel: Prior to writing this book and obviously doing all the interviews for it, had you found any support groups online or had you found any other people or even other forums where you were able to talk about this and discuss this? Or was this something that you chatted about with your husband or other members of the family and that was it?
Harriet Brown: The latter. Even just in researching this book, when I went looking online, I did find a number of places where, like I said, parents who had been estranged, whose kids had estranged them – there were places for them to talk to each other and talk to experts, but nothing – the closest thing I found was a subreddit, actually, where people were talking about some of this.
I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why, but there’s nothing that I’m aware of, really, except for some odd nooks and crannies on Reddit. I think some of the reason is stigma and shame, like that no matter how clear it is to you that “this relationship is toxic for me and I can’t sustain it,” there’s still – I mean, I still feel a level of shame in having walked away from my mother. Especially since she died 3 years later – although I couldn’t have known that. It was an unexpected thing.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “She’s your mother. You only get one mother” – which I felt very keenly, and yet it didn’t ultimately change what I felt I had to do. But that level of shame and obligation – and there’s also a big cultural narrative around “Honor your father and mother,” no matter what, no matter how crappy they are to you or how problematic the relationship is. It’s sort of your obligation and your duty as a child to give them that honor and respect.
I don’t know if any of that actually explains why it’s so hard to find support, but that is the reason why Stand Alone is such a great organization, because they stand in for that role for a lot of young people in the UK, which is marvelous.
Chris Sandel: What have you done or what did you do to deal with the stigma or the shame of being an adult child who was estranged from their parents?
Harriet Brown: Earlier in my life, when it wasn’t a complete estrangement for years at a time, mostly I just suffered, honestly. [laughs] I probably made my husband suffer, too – I know I did. I cried a lot, and I’m sure I bored my friends to tears. I tried to deal with it as an issue of personal responsibility, in a way, like “This is so messed up and I don’t know what to do,” and just getting that kind of support.
It honestly never occurred to me to look for broader support, again, because this kind of troubled relationship, for me personally and for all of us in general, the blame is put on the kid, the person who wants to do the estranging.
One of the really interesting things that I came across in researching the book was the fact that a couple of studies have shown that when you ask the parents who have been estranged by their kids, “What’s the problem? What happened? What’s the source of your estrangement?”, the vast majority of them say, “I have no idea.” But when you ask the adult children who have done the estranging, they’re very, very clear about what it is.
So there’s this huge cognitive dissonance and this disconnect. I struggled with that because I experienced it in my own family. I felt like my mother and I had thousands of conversations over the years where I felt like, “Okay, I’m a writer. I’m pretty good with words. I’m just going to lay this out very clearly,” and yet no matter how I framed it or laid it out, she said she had no idea, she didn’t understand, “Why can’t I explain to her what’s wrong?” It really messes with your mind.
One of the things this researcher, Kristina Scharp, who did these studies said to me about this was she thinks the parents who are being estranged have a deep investment in not wanting to know what went wrong because it would be too – they can’t do anything about it, maybe, or they feel they can’t do anything about it and it’s too threatening to their sense of self. It’s easier for them emotionally on a certain level to just say “I don’t understand this.” Which was really enlightening to me.
Chris Sandel: When you spoke to your sister, what would she say your mother thought was the reason? Was there anything definitive that your mother was able to say, “I think this is why this is going on”?
Harriet Brown: Yeah. My mother thought that I didn’t like her and that I was a bad person. That’s literally what she told my sister. [laughs] And that I was a very difficult person to get along with. That’s what she needed to believe, I guess, to live with this situation.
And again, as a parent I cannot imagine how painful it would be to have your child say, “I want nothing more to do with you. You’re really toxic in my life. Get away from me.” It would be the worst thing that could happen to you as a parent. Imagine that, if your son someday said that to you.
The difference, I think, is that I hope if that ever did happen to me as a parent, I would do whatever I could to understand it from my child’s point of view and address it, whatever it was.
Chris Sandel: I think there was a story that you told about that in the book. It might’ve even been in someone else’s memoir or something, where there was some reconciliation because for whatever reason, someone realized – it was brought to their attention and they were like, “This wasn’t my intention, but I understand that that’s how you felt and I now need to make amends.”
Harriet Brown: Yes. That was from a book, actually, and it was about a woman who had several daughters and was estranged from all of them, and it was very moving because she described going through a long, emotionally difficult process of not just having a single conversation and saying, “What was it? Explain it to me,” but spending years really recreating a relationship where they could trust each other.
One of the things that used to happen with my mother is we’d have this big fight, we wouldn’t talk for a while, then we would try to reconcile – and I remember saying to my mother often, later on, “We have to rebuild trust, and that’s just going to take time.” My mother didn’t accept that. She was like, “You either trust me right now or there’s nothing.”
So this mom that I was telling the story about got that, she spent a long time rebuilding that trust and being there for her daughters and accepting everything they said – not necessarily that she agreed with their perspective, but that she accepted that this was their experience and their perspective, and she validated that that was how they had experienced it. She kept saying, “I’m so sorry that I hurt you,” and they were able to rebuild that trust, which is pretty cool. But I’m guessing it’s pretty unusual.
Chris Sandel: I also am wondering if other people read that and that also keeps them in the cycle for longer. That’s what I imagine you were holding out hope for all along, like “at some point, something’s going to click and then she’s going to change, and then she’s going to be that mother I always hoped that she would be.” Then you read this story and you’re like, “Oh, it happened for them. Maybe it can now happen for me.”
Harriet Brown: Yeah, that’s right. I think that was probably like a one in a million, honestly. I think people don’t tend to change in those ways unless they have a really big reason, and I think for that woman, being cut off from her daughters was enough to push her to really examine herself and her behaviors and to really go beyond her own feelings and empathize with theirs, whatever she thought of it. She was able to empathetically connect with them.
In the vast majority of the stories I’ve heard, there’s alcoholism, there’s substance abuse, or most of the time there’s some kind of mental health issue that makes that parent incapable of empathetically connecting in that way. I finally got to the point where I could say I don’t blame my mother. Yeah, she did the best she could with what she had, but it’s also true that the best she could do was really bad for me. I can walk away without saying “You’re a shitty person” – whoops, I probably shouldn’t say that.
Chris Sandel: You can swear as much as you like. [laughs]
Harriet Brown: [laughs] Okay. I can walk away without saying “You’re a terrible person,” but I’m still walking away because that’s what I need to do for myself.
Chris Sandel: What about your husband in this? Earlier in the conversation, you said that his suggestion was just ignore it or don’t take it on board, she’s an idiot. But how long did it take before that changed and he was on board with “I think you not having contact is probably a wise decision”?
Harriet Brown: That took about a year of our relationship. It was partly because early in our relationship, we were actually planning our wedding and she showed her true self to him, as she did because that was who she was and she couldn’t really help it, and he was like, “Okay, never mind. I take it all back. This is really bad, and I don’t know how to suggest you fix this, so never mind all of that.” [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Is that something you found with other interviews you conducted? If someone got into a relationship and there was then this outsider perspective who was able to see how damaging this relationship was, that could then be helpful in helping someone make that decision to go down that road?
Harriet Brown: Yeah, absolutely. I know that I always felt like “Oh my God, there’s something really, really wrong with me.” Again, the family narrative from my mother about me was that I was always selfish, mean, incapable of love, and I truly believed that. So for me, meeting my husband and marrying him and being married to him all these years has been intensely wonderful – for a lot of reasons, but largely because he has offered this other perspective that’s very validating and very much like I don’t have to just internalize this other story. I can see that there’s another way to see it.
When you’re a kid and you grow up in a family, you don’t necessarily know what other families are like. You just think that’s how it is. It takes well into adulthood to even begin to get a sense that “wait a minute, it’s not always like that for everybody.” There’s other ways to be.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I’ve had a real period of reflection, especially from doing the work that I do now, thinking about kids that I went to school with where their parents were divorced or this and that went on. As a child, you have no understanding of how much of an impact that can be making on someone, but now as an adult, realizing, “Oh, okay, now that starts to make a lot more sense than it did when I was younger.”
Harriet Brown: Yeah, absolutely.
01:10:05
Chris Sandel: I’d love to talk about forgiveness and the concept of forgiveness. This is something that you write a lot about in the book and look at from different angles and try to get to the point where you understand what it would mean for you. Do you want to talk a little about that?
Harriet Brown: Forgiveness is such a loaded issue when we’re talking about estrangement because, again, that becomes part of the social pressure that comes at you. “Why can’t you just forgive your mother? Why are you holding onto this resentment? Why can’t you just be more forgiving?” And then there’s people who say, “You know, when you stay angry at someone and you don’t forgive, that only hurts yourself” – which is more or less true.
But I had to spend a lot of time thinking and reading about what forgiveness means. I think for a lot of us, the idea of forgiving someone who’s hurt us is scary because you think it automatically means, “If I forgive you, then I have to make myself vulnerable to you again. If I forgive my mother, then we’re back in a relationship and she can keep doing these things to me over and over again, and that’s really scary.”
One of the things that I had to do was separate the idea of forgiveness from the idea of reconciliation. They don’t necessarily go together. You can forgive someone, and we could talk about what that means, because I’m still not 100% sure. But you can think in your mind, “I forgive this person, but I still don’t want to change the boundary I’ve made for them. I still don’t want to be vulnerable to them.”
It wasn’t until after my mother died that I could really think about all this stuff, and I realized it was because she couldn’t hurt me anymore. At some level, even though it didn’t make that much sense – I was an adult with my own life, and what does it matter what she said? But it did matter. It very much mattered.
And what is forgiveness? That’s something I’ve thought a lot about. Does forgiving someone mean you say, “It’s okay what you did”? I don’t think so. Does it mean saying, “I understand why you did what you did”? Maybe. I don’t know. Is that a component of it? Does it mean saying, “I don’t hate you for what you did or I’m not overtly angry at you”? I actually still grapple with that sense of what it means to forgive someone.
The closest I’ve been able to come is to say that you can think about them with compassion and an open heart, even if you don’t like what they did or don’t want to have a relationship with them. But actually, it’s something I’m kind of obsessed with, so maybe I’ll ask you: what do you think forgiveness is?
Chris Sandel: I’ve been thinking about this as part of reading your book and in preparation for this, and I will just say that I haven’t had the situations that you’ve had, and I haven’t had a situation in my life where there’s been this deep hurt and pain and I’ve been in a situation where I have to be wrestling with the idea of forgiveness. So for me, this is all in theory, so it looks very different than when this is in your nervous system and you’re having to really deal with it.
But I was aware of the idea of forgiveness without reconciliation, and I think being able to separate those two is really important. The thing that people say – I don’t know where it originates, but it’s like staying angry with someone is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to get ill. So I get the forgiveness piece as, again, an act of self-care. The forgiveness is really not about that other person. It’s how you get to a point that this is now not damaging to yourself, because it’s not going to be damaging to that other person.
So there’s that, and you talked about starting to explore – and I don’t know when this happened – but looking into your mother’s own upbringing, and doing that exploratory work of understanding what made her who she is and if that helps to soften the blow somewhat.
For me, I’ve done a lot of reading around the idea of free will, and I’ve actually done a whole solo podcast on this topic. I’m a pretty big believer in we don’t have free will and that we are impacted upon by all of the prior causes in our life, whether that be genetics, whether that be upbringing, whether that be cosmic rays, whatever it is.
I can get to a place with that, again, where you’re like, just because someone did something horrible, doesn’t necessarily mean I excuse the behavior, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to have that person hanging around within my life and continuing to cause problems. But there’s some level of if I was in their shoes, I’d had their upbringing, I’d had every single experience that they had, who am I to think that I would do something different?
Harriet Brown: Right. I think that’s very wise. The only thing I would add is that I think anger is a necessary part of your process toward forgiveness, or reconciliation if that’s where you’re going. I think if you don’t let yourself really feel the anger and be aware of it and experience it, then it never goes away, and that’s part of it.
You hear stories about parents who stand up in courtrooms at the trial of the person who killed their child, and they say, “I forgive you.” I’m like, how could you possibly – you’re skipping a step, and I think that’s something else. That’s not forgiveness. I don’t know what that is.
Chris Sandel: I agree. What I’ve just outlined, again, is very detached, is very theoretical. If something happened to my son at the hands of someone else, I don’t think I would be on Day 1 instantly going to “Oh, no one has free will, so it’s not that person’s fault.” That would take a long time to get to the place where I genuinely feel that within my bones.
But for me, it’s like that’s the mental model or the theory or theoretical framework that I’m starting from, and then let’s see how well I’m going to be able to keep that up when the emotions really come into it. It’s like meditation is great in theory, and then let’s see what happens when the rubber hits the road and you’re in a real situation.
Harriet Brown: Yeah, it’s great when you’re calm already, but what happens when you’re freaking out? [laughs]
01:17:45
Chris Sandel: You made reference to a book that I hadn’t heard about, but I thought was really interesting, The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal. Do you want to talk a little about that? I thought that sounds like a fantastic book.
Harriet Brown: It really is. Have you had a chance to look for a copy of it?
Chris Sandel: I have not, but I would like to.
Harriet Brown: It’s this little book. Basically, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jew who was incarcerated at Auschwitz and I think a couple of other concentration camps during the Holocaust who survived. In it, he tells a story of something that happens to him one day while he was a prisoner. He was yanked out of line and asked to go up into this room where there was a young Nazi soldier who was dying. This soldier wanted to confess to a Jew, any Jew – he was pulled out of the line at random.
So he was made to sit there for a number of hours and listen as this soldier described all these horrible things that he had done, killing Jews, setting fire to buildings full of people, killing children, the worst things. Then at the end, he basically said to Simon Wiesenthal, “I need you to forgive me.” It was like, what should he do at that point? Which is another way of saying, what does it mean to forgive?
What he did in that moment was he walked away. He did not say, “I forgive you.” He didn’t offer any consolation. He left. But it bothered him a lot, and long after the war, he told this story to a number of prominent philosophers and thinkers, Jewish, non-Jewish, a whole range of people, and said, “What was the right thing to do and what would you have done?”
So the book is his story and then all of these responses that he gathered from other people. It’s pretty interesting because it pretty much covers the gamut of the way people think about forgiveness. It’s a really thought-provoking read, and it’s short and a fast read, so I recommend it.
Chris Sandel: Did it help you better understand forgiveness? Was there anything that you took out of that where you’re like, “That’s something I hadn’t thought about before”?
Harriet Brown: I think that might be where I was first exposed to the idea of forgiveness but not reconciliation. I’m pretty sure one or two of the people in there wrote about that. A lot of the people he approached to weigh in on this were religious, and I’m not a religious person, so that didn’t resonate with me.
One thing that did resonate with me was this idea that this soldier was asking Wiesenthal to forgive him for things that hadn’t been done to him, so forgiveness by proxy, in a way. There was a pretty clear consensus that that’s not a thing. I can’t give someone forgiveness for something that they did to someone else.
So that was enlightening to me also, but at the time, it didn’t help me with the thing I was struggling with, which was: what does it actually, literally look like to forgive someone, and how do you know when you’re actually doing it and not just going through the motions? I had to come to that myself.
Chris Sandel: What about your experience with the Stanford Forgiveness Project? Do you want to talk about that and explain what that is?
Harriet Brown: I went to this weekend workshop in New York City run by a guy – that’s his project. He founded it. It was two days of being in a small, intense group, talking about forgiveness and getting his perspective on it. There were like a dozen of us. Fred Luskin very much falls into the category of you forgive because it’s better for you to forgive, and it only hurts you if you’re not forgiving.
Also, his perspective was when we’re angry, when we hold anger at someone in that way, it’s because we expected or wanted them to do something different than what they did, and that’s just expecting the world to be a place that it’s not. In a way, I think he sees forgiveness as accepting reality, the reality of how the world is and how people are, and understanding that we’re not special and we don’t deserve special treatment.
But he did help me see this idea of – I think he posed a question to me at one point like, “Can you think about your mother with an open heart and still not want to get back into a relationship with her?” He definitely helped me with that separation which was necessary to feel safe enough to begin whatever process it was.
01:23:20
Chris Sandel: It was also interesting that he used this analogy that you made reference to in the book as part of helping you to accept the situation, like if you have got a busted-up knee or you’ve ripped open your knee, the options that you have are to just carry on with that constant pain or to have surgery. You wishing that you didn’t have the problem with your knee is not going to change the situation. And then before we jumped on this call, I was checking out your Instagram and I noticed that you’ve had knee surgery. [laughs] I was like, that is quite hilarious.
Harriet Brown: [laughs] Yes, and I would have to say I wish I hadn’t. I wish I wasn’t in this pain. But as he pointed out, it doesn’t pay to wish that things are different than they are.
There’s real truth to that. We have to deal with the world the way it is, and we have to deal with other people the way they are. But again, the liberating part of that is to say, “Yeah, I have to accept that’s who my mother was. She was never going to turn into the mother I wanted,” so then the only control I have is over my own actions. For me, as for a lot of people, that’s why it’s so liberating to say, “You are who you are. I accept you for who you are, but I don’t want you in my life.” And that’s okay.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think that acceptance piece as well lines up a lot with what I see with eating disorder recovery. There’s so much of like “I want to recover, but I want these different things to happen, and I want it to be like this.” It’s like, but that’s not on the menu. That is not going to happen. The reality of the situation is these are the things that need to happen for you to recover.
The reason that people stay stuck is because there’s the constant trying to find another way to be able to do recovery in the way that they want it to look. In the same way, people stay stuck in these relationships because they’re constantly trying to find a way that it will look differently or be different, when all the messages you’re being sent for decades are like, that’s just not going to happen.
Harriet Brown: Right. That’s a great analogy. All the years I spent wishing I had a different mother, but I had to accept that that was the mother I had, that was who she was. I had to let go of any longing for her to change – I mean, let go of most of it; I think you never let go of all of it – and say, “Okay, this is how it is. Now, how do I choose to respond to it?”
Chris Sandel: I also want to say if any of what I just said there was sort of glib, like “Hey, just get on with it, just get in touch with reality,” that’s definitely not how it is. I don’t mean that it’s easy or simple or anything along those lines, but that’s where I often see the similarities.
Harriet Brown: I agree with you. As someone who knows quite a bit about eating disorders too, I think there is a certain level on which it’s not that flippant, “Just get on with it,” but it’s a process. It often involves grieving and feeling angry – grieving for what you feel you don’t have and being angry about wishing things were different. But ultimately, it is about accepting how things are and then making your choice, whatever that choice is.
01:27:05
Chris Sandel: What about your dad? Is he still alive? How’s the relationship with him going? I know the book ends focusing a little bit on that, but it came out 2 years ago. I don’t know at what point you actually finished writing it, so I just wanted to get an update of where things with that are.
Harriet Brown: My dad died almost exactly a year ago, but before he died – part of the backstory was I was more or less estranged from him too because my mother said, “If you’re not in a relationship with me, you can’t be in one with him,” and he was the kind of person to go along with that – which is, I think, how he stayed married to my mother.
So I really didn’t have a relationship with him. Then after she died, he wasn’t sure he wanted to pick up a relationship with me, which was really hurtful, but I understood it. Eventually he decided he did, and we were able to reconcile and to have some time together. Then he had a catastrophic stroke, and he wound up moving up to the town that I live in, to an assisted living place, and I was his caregiver for the last 4 years of his life.
That was a pretty healing experience for me. We had been able, before his stroke, to talk about a lot of the stuff that happened, but not resolve it. I’m not sure there was any way to resolve it. It was just we were able to share our feelings with each other.
Then when he was here and in a somewhat vulnerable position, it was good for me because I was able to reconnect with my sense of love for him and compassion for him. I was also still angry at him for things that had happened, but I was able to also have this other thing and rebuild this other connection with him.
I’m still really sad that he died, and I miss him, even though I also have all those other feelings. So for me, it was a bit of a happy ending that we were able to come to that place even before his stroke, where we could reconnect. It felt good. It did.
Chris Sandel: Did it feel like his perception of you shifted because your mother wasn’t around giving her input which was coloring his view, and you were then more in that caregiver role? I don’t know if it shifted things for how he saw you then or if it shifted things for how he saw you across your whole life.
Harriet Brown: That is a good question. My husband would say it absolutely shifted things. I remain a little unsure, partly because my dad was never a big talker, and then after he had the stroke he couldn’t talk. Although he was still totally with it mentally, he didn’t have language anymore.
I think it did shift things for hm. I think he saw me differently, and I recognized that part of why I wanted him to come to my town, and not go to where my sister was, was because I wanted to show him that I was actually a person capable of love and care. So I don’t know. I hope so, but I’ll never really know.
01:30:40
Chris Sandel: I know we’ve talked about how much of a taboo topic this is, so how much did your kids know about all of this when they were growing up and then young adults? Have they read the book?
Harriet Brown: No, they haven’t read the book. They don’t want to read any books that I’ve written. [laughs] Can’t really blame them.
I tried when they were kids to not color their relationship with my mother, which was of course impossible. But the reality is, they saw enough of my mother’s bad behavior, let’s say, or upsetting behavior. They experienced it and they also saw her do it to me over and over again. They both went through periods when they were teens where they wanted to have more of a connection with my mother, and I tried to facilitate that – and for both of them, my mother pretty much blew it immediately.
They both I think felt and still feel like “Your mother was kind of a jerk, and you shouldn’t worry about it,” pretty much. [laughs] I wasn’t one of those parents who could hide everything that was happening to me. But really, my younger daughter when she was 13 was like, “I want to go down to Florida and see my grandparents.” I was like, “Okay.” Sent her down, and within like 5 hours of arriving, she was on the phone, crying, saying, “I want to come home” because of what my mother was doing. My mother was who she was and she couldn’t be someone else, and they experienced that too.
Chris Sandel: I’ve been thinking about this as well, being a parent and thinking about how I was raised. I think with my parents, there were probably people that they didn’t get on so well with within the family, but that was never really discussed with us. We had relationships with them, and our relationships would be our relationships with them. It’s only now as we’ve become older and adults that we can have more of those conversations.
I think most of the time, my leaning would be towards that, but I guess there is a threshold in which things are crossed, and for that reason I never met my grandfather – or if I did meet him, it was when I was very young and it never happened ever again. So yeah, there is no blanket rule. It is a difficult thing to decide.
Harriet Brown: Yeah, for sure. I was going to ask if you had brothers and sisters.
Chris Sandel: I do. I’ve got an older brother and a younger sister. It’s also interesting – you talked about what it would be like to have your child be estranged and leave you, and I often reflect on the fact that at age 21, I left Sydney and moved to the UK and I’ve never returned. I’ve gone there on holidays, but I’ve now been – I think as of last week, it was 17 years living over here. It’s not total estrangement, but it’s definitely something my parents have to deal with that I’m not around the corner the way that my brother and sister are.
Harriet Brown: Yeah, that’s got to be hard for them. And yet, of course, it’s your life to do with as you want.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it is. It was interesting when reading through in terms of the definition of estrangement. It can be having limited conversations or limited contact with people, and there’s definitely been times where, throughout a year, I might only speak to my brother two or three times just because we’ve both got kids, we’re both very busy. But the difference is when I then see him because I go over there or he comes over here, there’s no animosity. We are back into us being siblings and enjoying spending time with one another. So even though maybe we meet the definition for estrangement in some ways, it definitely doesn’t feel like that.
Harriet Brown: I don’t think of that as estrangement. I just think of that as life circumstances. Obviously, there’s an element of choice involved, but as you say – with my husband and his brother, they only talk about twice a year. There’s not animosity, but there’s also not closeness. I think that’s a little wee bit of estrangement. But anyway, it’s kind of how you define it, though.
Chris Sandel: When writing the book, were there worries about “What is the family going to think?” Was there any of that for you, or were you past it?
Harriet Brown: Oh, no, there were huge worries. In fact, mainly about my sister because I have a relationship with her and I want to maintain a relationship with her. I’m aware that we see things very differently. I actually sent her the manuscript before it was finalized, and she was very upset by it and had some things she wanted me to change. We talked about things, and at some point she said to me, “I was unaware of a lot of the things you’re writing about.” So I think it was good.
There are big chunks of my family that don’t talk to me at all, though. Not because of the book, necessarily, but the book didn’t help. [laughs] I just have to come to terms with that, and that’s okay. It is what it is.
Chris Sandel: Harriet, this has been a wonderful conversation. Is there anything that we haven’t chatted about or any areas that you want to spend a bit more time on that we did touch on?
Harriet Brown: No, I think it’s been a great conversation. I really appreciate how thoughtful you’ve been. I really appreciate this. I think you’ve hit everything, really, so thank you for that.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. If people want to find out more, where do you want to be pointing them towards? Any website, social media, any of that kind of thing? I’ll put it in the show notes, but by all means, you can list them for people.
Harriet Brown: I’ve got a website. It’s just harrietbrown.com. I’m pretty easy to find on Instagram and Twitter, and I have a Facebook page – I think it’s called Good Non-fiction. You can just look it up, and I’m happy to connect with people. I actually have ongoing conversations with many, many people.
I think pretty much everything I write winds up being fairly personal, and people connect to it personally. That’s one of the pleasures of doing this work: getting to connect with other people who have had similar experiences or related experiences. We all have to remind each other that we’re not alone in our feelings and our experiences.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. If people are wanting to contact you, what’s the best avenue to do that through?
Harriet Brown: They can email me at harriet@harrietbrown.com. I think that’s the email address you have for me, which is the one you can get on my website. I’m happy for that kind of connection.
Chris Sandel: Thank you so much for your time today. This was a really great conversation. As I said at the beginning, this is something that is impacting on lots of clients I’m seeing, so I think they’re going to get a lot of benefit out of this.
Harriet Brown: Thank you so much for hosting and facilitating it. I would be interested at some point in knowing more about the work you do with eating disorders patients, too. I’m glad to connect with you.
Chris Sandel: That was my interview with Harriet Brown, and I’m really thankful that we had to time to really delve into this topic in the detail that we did. Despite how much we got to chat about this, we’ve really just scratched the surface on everything that she covers in her book, so if this is something that is going on in your life and it’s something you want to find out more about, then please do check out Harriet’s book, Shadow Daughter.
01:39:25
For me, on to a recommendation of something to check out, if you’ve been following this podcast for any length of time or if you’ve listened to my end-of-year roundup episodes, you’ll know that one of my favorite podcasts is Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History.
The fifth season of that has just started again, or at least has started at the point at which I’m recording this intro, and each season is only 10 episodes. They’re between 30 and 50 minutes long, most of the episodes. For the next 10 weeks, every Thursday, I will listen to the episode on the Thursday as soon as it comes out.
Most episodes are standalone episodes, so you don’t have to listen to them in order, although he has done some two-part episodes or three-part episodes on a particular topic. But even with those, he makes it so most of them can still be listened to on their own and make sense. Each season has a general theme around it, but he has a really great way of talking about all these different ideas and topics and things that we think we know about from history and why this maybe needs a second look, and that there’s some other explanation for what’s going on.
It’s incredibly well-produced, and I always find it fascinating, so I’m excited for the next 10 weeks and highly recommend checking it out. If you do like it or like Malcolm Gladwell in terms of any of his other books and you haven’t listened to his most recent book called Talking to Strangers, I would highly recommend giving that a listen.
He does an amazing job on the audio version of it through Audible, making it much like a podcast, where there’s music, and if he’s interviewing a guest or a subject for the book, he will play the recording of that interview. What I find with a lot of audiobooks is it can become quite tedious and boring because someone has a not-great narration style; he makes it very easy to listen to and very interesting.
Given what is going on in the world at the moment in terms of race relations and everything breaking down with the police and all of that, it is a book that is well worth having a listen to because a lot of the topics he explores as part of that are covered in the book.
That’s my recommendations for this week. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Seven Health is currently taking on clients. If you’re struggling with dieting, recovery, disordered eating, body image issues, or really any of the topics that we cover on the show, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help. I will be back with a show again next week. Until then, take care of yourself, stay safe, and I will see you soon.
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