What I say...

... when someone asks about my estrangement.

Hi,

I got such a great response to last week’s post¹, I’m going to open this week’s post the same way:

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re in the stands at your kid’s sportsball game, or at a happy hour with work friends, and you’re engaged in small(ish) talk that is going slightly more deep/interesting with another adult you don’t know that well. And they ask you about your family of origin, from whom you’re estranged. And you…

• Freeze up.

• Don’t know what to say.

• End up blurting out the whole 15-minute story and feeling insane.

• Or lie because you just don’t have the energy to tell the truth. (I’ve chosen estrangement.) More accurately, you don’t have the energy to endure their potentially invalidating response. (But that’s your mom!)

If you recognize this scene, I want to share a little about how I used to deal with this, how I deal with this now, and what has changed.

“Getting to know you, getting to know all about you”

Why I used to freeze when asked about my family

A lot of us who grew up in households where feelings were suppressed or invalidated didn’t learn how to portion out sensitive information. We were told never to talk about certain things and punished if we slipped.

Then we grew up and left home. In many cases, we spent a lot of our early adulthoods in a binge-restrict cycle: either we shared some of the most sensitive information about our early relationships with people who hadn’t proved they were trustworthy enough to receive this information (binge) or we told nobody nothin’ and felt alone (restrict).

We never learned how to share a little bit in a way that both fosters closeness and protects the most sensitive parts of ourselves. But we can learn.

How I changed this

Two people helped me mature out of this cycle: Dan Savage and my therapist. Dan Savage, the sex and relationships advice columnist and podcaster², would often advise people who were scared of revealing something about themselves to do it, but not to set themselves up for rejection. Rather, they should reveal the thing so that they could find out whether the other person was someone they should keep seeing.

Savage would say, “When you tell them you are HIV+ [for example], you are telling them one thing about yourself. But their reaction is telling you everything you need to know about whether they’re worthy of you.” I haven’t listened to his show in years, but that advice stuck with me.

If I do choose to tell a person about my family estrangements, that’s me saying one thing about myself. Rather than focusing on whether they recoil in disgust or judge me, I focus on what they’re reaction tells me about them. Sometimes it tells me just a little; sometimes a lot.

My therapist helped me further by suggesting some “opening gambits” for me.³

“My mother and I are not close,” is an example of an opening gambit. It’s not my whole life story. It’s not even particularly specific. But it is true: a small truth to introduce into a conversation, maybe after one or a few rounds of small talk.

So, maybe this other person and I are talking about whether we have family living nearby, and the other person mentions that their mother lives far away, but they don’t reveal how they feel about it. (Relieved? Sad? Ambivalent?)

I might say, “My mom lives in town, but we are not that close.”

Then, I observe.

They may have a whole range of reactions: they may not comment and change the subject. They may say, “Oh, yeah, my mom and I are not that close, either. It’s actually been easier for me to have her living far away.” They may say, “Oh, that’s too bad.” They may say, “Oh, my mom and are like sisters!” etc.

This is what I mean by “portioning out” information. Back when I used to “binge” and tell people everything, they were often overwhelmed. I, who was sharing something very vulnerable, felt judged and rejected. Sometimes they actually were being judgmental and rejecting. And sometimes, they were just… still processing what I was saying.

So, now, to protect myself, I don’t share everything, and I don’t share much at all unless people have first done well with a few of my opening gambits.

It’s not about me judging them—I’m actually not judging them, per se. I’m judging whether I feel comfortable being vulnerable around them. By definition, none of us can or should feel comfortable being vulnerable with everyone. So, it’s OK if I realize, “No, not with this person,” or “I’m not sure, so not yet.”

Why this works for me

Through this process, I have been able to let go of a lot of my sensitivity to whether the person on the other end is judgmental. Instead of feeling betrayed by them, I think, “Oh, I got you confused with someone who can handle having an intimate conversation with me. My bad!”

Sometimes, I still get very angry or feel shame when the other person is invalidating. Especially when it’s someone that I have previously had good conversations with or felt close to. But often, I don’t feel as reactive to people’s stupid responses, because people say a lot of stupid things.

And akshually… I say a lot of stupid things. Let’s go there. I’ve been dismissive; I’ve been hurtful; and I haven’t always realized it. Even when I have realized it, I haven’t always had the opportunity to apologize. I wouldn’t want the people who experienced that to carry around some dumbass thing I said. I hope some of those judgmental people also feel like they wouldn’t want me to carry around a stupid comment they said.

I’m sure you’ve heard the concept that when people say hurtful or dismissive things it is almost always because they are projecting. AKA, they are running the information you’re giving them through the lens of their own experience. So, if you say, “I don’t have a good relationship with my mother,” and they said, “Oh, that’s awful!” they mean that it would be awful, for them.

Or, I’ve come to find out, sometimes they mean, “I feel the exact same way about my relationship with my mother… but I would never say it out loud.” (Or even, I would never admit it to myself.)

It’s OK for them to feel these things. It’s also OK for me (or you) to feel invalidated by their comments, even if we understand where they are coming from.

Not to sound toxically positive, but sometimes the thought really does count.

Sometimes, people don’t say the wrong thing, but it’s just not the thing I need to hear. This happened to me the other day. Someone reached out to me after I revealed on Instagram that I was struggling with something difficult, and they said something that didn’t really resonate with me. But then I thought:

This friend bothered to try to comfort me.

The fact that someone else wants to be there for me means just as much or even more than whatever they say.

People do want to connect, and do want to get to know each other better, and that means some screwing up, saying the wrong thing, and so on. But connection and closeness are going to be our only reliable comforts in this insane historical “moment” (that feels like forever), and we must prioritize them.

So fostering that connection while still protecting our hearts is a good practice.

What do you think? Is this like, so obvious that I didn’t need to write this piece? What else have I missed? Let me know in the comments.

1.

2. Dan Savage has said loads of problematic things over the years, and my mentioning him here is not an endorsement of everything he has ever said on any and all topics. K?

3. She didn’t call it this, but I do.