Estrangement and Reconciliation: Teshuva for Our Relationships

David Bashevkin:

Hello and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore a different topic, balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re exploring teshuvah.

Thank you so much to our series sponsors, Daniel and Mira Stokar. I’m so grateful for your friendship and support and thank you so much to our episode sponsor, Dr. Leah Younger. Aside from sponsoring this episode, Dr. Younger was an integral part of putting this episode together, connecting me with some of our guests, top psychologists in the field. She herself is a psychologist and has a practice known as Younger Psychology. And her sponsorship is of course dedicated to educated, provide guidance, support for all those affected personally and as professionals by any sort of difficulty, brokenness, mental health. And I am so grateful for her guidance, friendship support, somebody who I didn’t know reached out, a friend of 18Forty. Thank you so much for dedicating this episode.

This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy Jewish ideas. So be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. There is a fascinating article that was shown to me by rabbi, Dr. Ari Berman, who’s the president of Yeshiva University. He wrote an article about this, I think a while back in while he was like Torah To Go. It was an eye-opening article. It is called, “From Ghosts to Ancestors, the psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald.” I’ve never heard of Hans Loewald before. The articles written by somebody named Steven Mitchell. And it is a fascinating article by the way that we relate to our own past. Each one of us has a past. We have parents, we have grandparents, we have great-grandparents, we have people who brought us, who loved us, support us into this world.

A part of having a past is also the pain of the past. Maybe a grimace that you got from a parents, from an older sibling. A question that was maybe asked innocently, but struck you in a way, that hurt you in some way or made you feel a little alienated. And he has this remarkable idea in these two models in which we relate to the past. These are the words of Hans Loewald, which I found absolutely eye-opening: Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation. While as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life. Ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defenses, but haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses and symptoms are allowed to taste blood, are let loose.

In the daylight of analysis, the ghost of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life. I think it’s a remarkable idea that there are two ways in which we can relate to our past. Sometimes our past feels like it is a ghost. We have parents who maybe we wish loved us in a different way, older siblings. People from previous generations who you wish gave us the care that we so desperately wanted and so desperately needed and continue to haunt us as ghosts of our past. And there is another way which we can relate to our past and that is as ancestors. A past that can nourish, that can uplift. That even with all of the faults that any generation, any previous generation, always leaves the next with some issues that they need to grapple with, some unmet expectations.

But they’re still our ancestors and are able to nourish our present. And I think it’s a fitting way to think about the Yamim Noraim, the high holidays, where our teshuvah is not just on people who are living, people who are with us. But our teshuvah’s the way that we relate to our past and our previous generation. There is a notion of giving tzedakah, giving charity, specifically for a teshuvah, for a reconciliation of previous generations. And I think a part of that teshuvah is not that… They’re already in the world of truth, but part of that teshuvah is our own reconciliation. How do we relate to our past? And a central part of what we have focused on in 18Forty in so many different ways is familial relationships, familial reconciliation, and really staring at some of the difficulties of keeping a family together in the present. And I hope a part of this conversation helps each of us in our own way kind of transform the ghosts of our past into ancestors to find some way, some measure of reconciliation.

Not all of us are dealing with cosmic familial drama, but I imagine there are none of us that don’t have any familial drama. Every family in their own ways grapples with issues of who got more attention, who got more love, who is more important, who gave the love that we really need, who disappointed. I think when we think in those terms, part of our teshuvah is how we relate to those that we love. And there is an instinct sometimes and sometimes it’s absolutely necessary to kind of cut off the past.

And I don’t want to end here because there’s so much more to this idea and this topic. And I was looking for somebody who was really an expert in this field. And it was actually our episode sponsor, Dr. Leah Younger, who reached out to me out of the clear blue sky. It’s like the gift of a listener. It’s not just a listener. I really look at 18Forty as a community, people who are reaching out. They’re pushing back, they’re critiquing, they’re explaining what they’ve brought into their own lives. They’re grappling with the issues that we surface in whatever episode and whatever series. I’m so grateful to our listening community. Dr. Younger reached out really to look to sponsor to help support the work that we do. But in the process of our conversation, she highlighted to me an incredible therapist who’s done amazing work in the area of familial reconciliation and I want to make sure his writings, his work and his personality is on everyone’s radar.

And this person is somebody named Dr. Joshua Coleman. Dr. Joshua Coleman does not live within the Jewish community as far as I know, but is somebody who is intimately familiar of working at the very heart of the Jewish community. There is an incredible organization that I was so touched to speak with the founders of the organization. It is called Broken Ties and the entire organization is dedicated to helping family mend these disrepairs, and he has been a beacon of instruction, of light, of guidance to everything that Broken Ties does. And it was somebody that Dr. Leah Younger also mentioned to me and their work.

Dr. Joshua Coleman has written several books and you can check them all out online, his book, Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. He’s written many books but he has published recently in the Wall Street Journal in The Atlantic. So much of his work is on familial estrangement, particularly among adult children. And I have seen that more and more now as we grow up and we individuate so many of the needs of our parents, and people who listen to this podcast consistently know how much I love, admire and respect my parents, but I am no different. Everybody has this in their own way where as you individuate more, you set up your own family, build your own lives.

So much of the culture and traditions and quirks of everybody’s, individual’s parents, there are times where it can be grating, it can be frustrating and there are times where children pull back, which I think can be in a healthy way, but there are times where it can be quite disruptive to the family and the family unit. And I had a very real and honest conversation with Dr. Joshua Coleman really focused on his work in the Jewish community with Broken Ties on familial estrangement, particularly among adult children. And this is an epidemic that our community is beginning to open their eyes to and that is why it is such an absolute privilege and pleasure to share our conversation with Dr. Joshua Coleman.

I wanted to begin with a very basic question that doesn’t have a very easy answer, which is every family has its stresses, every parent makes mistakes, every child is frustrating. What are the triggers that cause actual family estrangement?

Joshua Coleman:

Yeah, I think the best way to think about it is that there are multiple pathways to an estrangement. The most common one that you see in the media is the idea that the parent was abusive or neglectful in some kind of way. And if you read the reports of the estranged adult children, that’s often what you’ll see, and indeed some parents have been or are abusive or neglectful and it’s at least understandable why some adult children might say that it’s just too hard to be in contact with the parent.

But that’s not the only pathway. It’s common that once there’s been a divorce that can weaken the tie between one or both of the parents for a variety of reasons. One is it can cause one parent to poison the child against the other parent as we see in parental alienation. It might cause the child independently to blame one parent over the other for breaking up the previously what they considered to be a happy reasonable home.

It can introduce new people into the child’s life that they have to compete with for emotional or material resources, step siblings, half siblings, stepparents, boyfriends, girlfriends, et cetera. Finally, in a highly individualistic culture like ours, it can cause the child young or old to see the parents more as individuals with their own kind of assets than liabilities and less as a family unit that they’re a part of. So divorce is a very common problem.

Mental illness, certainly in the parent but also in the child. There are many adult children who become mentally ill not because of parental abuse or neglect more because of genetic reasons or socioeconomic reasons. Therapy these days I believe is a big cause of estrangement.

David Bashevkin:

How would therapy cause estrangement?

Joshua Coleman:

Well, because many therapists aren’t really that educated in the role of memory. So they assume that every memory that the adult child brings to therapy is perfect or reasonable. They assume that memory operates like a video timestamp, which in fact it doesn’t, memory is very easy to distort. A lot of adult children might rewrite the history of their childhoods in line with a way to make themselves feel better about how their lives have turned out. They might say that they were traumatized when they weren’t. Some kids are traumatized. I’m not saying nobody who says that they were traumatized weren’t, but some adult children might say, “Well, the reason that I have issues with intimacy or anxiety or depression or success is because you neglected me or you abused me in some form or another.”

And a lot of parents today are being accused of that, in fact were not abusive or neglectful. Now part of that occurs because of what the Australian psychologist calls the notion of concept creep, which is that over the past three or four decades, we’ve greatly expanded what we consider to be emotional abuse, harm, trauma, et cetera. So sometimes generations are talking past each other. But there are many therapists who are not very well-trained who will assume that the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz says today our lives are plotted backwards. What’s a dysfunctional family? It’s a family where your needs weren’t met. How do you know your needs weren’t met by looking at your present condition?

David Bashevkin:

Wow.

Joshua Coleman:

Anyways, I love that.

David Bashevkin:

That’s a very profound concept where you almost reverse engineer the pathology based on your present. If I’m not successful, if I’m not happy, if I’m not thriving, it must be let’s, reverse engineer some trauma. And obviously anybody looking back will find something.

Joshua Coleman:

Absolutely. All of us can.

David Bashevkin:

No child hasn’t disappointed a parent and no parent hasn’t disappointed a child. I think what I want to focus on more than anything is actually to take overt abuse off the table for a moment.

Joshua Coleman:

Yeah.

David Bashevkin:

That’s obviously very complicated when there are actual criminal behavior, child abuse-

Joshua Coleman:

Sure.

David Bashevkin:

But what I am noticing more and more, and you mentioned this in between, you mentioned this concept called concept creep, which is we like to diagnose at a distance. Obviously if one child is going into a therapist’s office and describing their parents, it’s easy to hear a term. I know what the common terms are. I could imagine narcissism, borderline personality disorder. There are a lot of things. And very quickly a relationship can erode really, really fast.

Joshua Coleman:

Definitely.

David Bashevkin:

Is there any way to, when you feel that distance coming, before there is actual estrangement, and we’ll talk a little bit about what that means and what that looks like when adult children are stepping into their own lives. You had mentioned shifts in our culture, we’re much more individualistic. We want agency. So there’s something about the family unit that is inherently stifling. I have a last name that I walk around with. I have a reputation, I have siblings, I have parents. And I’m just wondering what can parents do? They didn’t grow up in this individualistic society, the family unit was it.

Joshua Coleman:

Right.

David Bashevkin:

How can you figure out when the relationship is beginning to erode but it’s unwarranted and each side now is in this crisis mode where the parent is like, “How could you?” And the child is screaming, “How could you?” Before it really breaks, what are the wrong steps and the right steps families can make so it doesn’t go into the full estrangement mode, though I want to cover full estrangement mode afterwards.

Joshua Coleman:

Yeah, well I think the most important thing is to acknowledge the shift that’s happened in the past half century or so, where the notions of family that used to define families not only in the United States but probably worldwide to a certain extent, the notion that family is forever, honor thy mother and thy father, respect thy elders has largely been given away to this much more therapeutic, I need to protect my mental health, my happiness, what Anthony Giddens, the sociologist in Britain refers to as pure relationships. The idea that we only enter in relationships that are purely in line with our ideals around intimacy, identity, happiness, et cetera.

And I think parents have to really come up to speed with the way that the culture has changed because their relationship with their adult child may hinge on whether or not they can make that show. Meaning parents can no longer just insist that they be respected because they’re the elders or even if they’ve done a better job than their parents did.

I have a webinar called the “Five Most Common Mistakes of Estranged Parents” and one of the most common mistakes is the use of guilt. For the longest time, I’ve thought about writing an article called The Last Jewish Mother because when I was growing up the stereotype of the Jewish mother, my mother could call me and go, “What? Mr. Fancy psychologist in San Francisco, you can’t call your mother?” She could guilt trip me, but she fortunately wasn’t a big guilt tripper. I adored my mother. But she could have and been in line with the culture at the time, right? Of course you call your mother, what kind of a person are you?

That is largely eroded. Parents can no longer guilt or a more neutral way to say that is to try to motivate them through feelings of guilt and obligation and expect a positive response. No, today That’s considered coercive. That’s considered an abusive authority. That’s considered gas-lighting, boundary crossing. Now you’re behaving in ways which aren’t in line with that child’s mental health or wellbeing. If you’re not already on the track towards estrangement, it’s going to put you on the track towards estrangement.

Parents are often saying to me, “Well why do I have to take the lead?” Well it’s, because A, your child probably isn’t going to, even if they’re in pain. For the adult child, there are many positives to either becoming estranged or even becoming distant. It can make them feel more authoritative, like they’re in charge of their own life. There can be enormous social support from peer group, from therapists, from online forums, it’s in line with our ideals of individualism, separation individuation, which therapists make a big deal about. For the adult child, it can be tied to all kinds of positive feelings.

So that completely imbalances. Who has the power in negotiation. From a pure game theory perspective, the person who has the least power has to give the most. So from that perspective, parents have to do much more. So to circle back to your question, parents need to get in line with the culture. They have to understand that guilt doesn’t work, anger doesn’t work. One of the worst pieces of advice I hear therapists giving all the time is, “Well, you have to stand up to your adult child, remind them of all the things that you did for them and insist that they treat you better.” And there may be a place for that. But fighting with your child is not going to get you what you want.

Far better to empathize, to understand, to find the kernel, if not the bushel of truth in the child’s complaints. And I think those to show compassion, to show empathy, to show a willingness to self-reflect particularly the willingness to self-reflect because relationships with younger adult children today are predicated much more on this principle of mental health and egalitarianism, et cetera. So if you’re willing to self-reflect, take responsibility to show interest in how your behavior caused your child to feel, even if you felt like you did a good job, you may have still been much more hurtful than you realize. All of those things can really make a big difference.

David Bashevkin:

A lot of what You’re saying and you mentioned explicitly is going against the grain of a lot of trends in psychology, which again emphasizes individual agency, you have to set up the boundaries that work for you come hell or high water. If that means that you’re going to cut off a relationship with a parent, we’re very severely limit it.

Joshua Coleman:

Right.

David Bashevkin:

What exactly compelled you to go against that grain and make family estrangement such a central part of your practice even when it goes against the grain of so much of popular thinking, and almost this is a strange question, and how do you know you’re right?

Joshua Coleman:

Well I know I’m right because of the thank you letters that I get daily from the parents in my practice, from the growing number of adult children who reach out to me to say that they appreciate it, from the family therapy work that I do all the time where I see that this methodology works. But I came by this, it wasn’t just professional curiosity. I have an adult child who’s in her 40s who I’m very close to now, but there was a period of time in her early 20s where she had cut off contact with me for several years in large part because of my divorce from my first wife, her mother, and my remarriage, my current wife of some 35 years. And her feeling in many ways displaced by my second marriage, how my children from my current marriage had a much better quality of life. They had a stable situation. How she felt in some ways neglected as a result of that.

And when she first started to complain about it, talk to me about it, I made all the mistakes that parents make today. I was defensive, I was critical, I was angry, I was guilt tripping. I was, “How can you do this to me after all the good ways that I’ve been a parent?” And it just drove her further and further away. And it wasn’t really until I began to completely shift into a position of empathy and responsibility-taking and finding the kernel if not the bushel of truth in her perspective and not arguing and not defending and not getting mad, that things really started to turn.

So I wrote my first book on the topic in 2007, When Parents Hurt, and as a result of that, that got a wide following of estranged parents both here and in other countries and then started doing webinars and free Q&A for parents, which I’ve been doing since then. Then in 2021 I wrote my book Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties, based on my research at the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, which has been published in numerous peer-reviewed articles.

So It’s given me a really big, deep understanding of not only what It’s like to be a parent going through this, the pain of it, the agony, the guilt, the anxiety, the anger, the sorrow, the regret. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to go through. Nothing I ever wish to go through again, but I kind of made it my mission and it still is my mission to try to help parents who are going through it and have been through it to help them not make the mistakes that I made or even the ones I didn’t make but every other parent is making. So that’s kind of how I got into it.

And in a desire to answer these questions, I did a really deep dive, as I continue to into sociology, I think It’s much more informative than psychology, economics, history. I think the answers are far more available there than in psychology because psychology is still rooted in a very somewhat self-centered kind of an orientation.

David Bashevkin:

No it’s very interesting, particularly the economic component. You have done very real work in the Jewish community and in the Hasidic community. I know that You’ve worked with an organization I’ve reached out to and interacted with called Broken Ties, which is doing incredible work not just in the Hasidic community, but it began in the Hasidic community. And it’s very interesting to me and I’m wondering if you could comment on this, we have a generation that has access to unprecedented wealth, particularly in the Jewish community where we’re able to support our children, able to give them things in ways that previous generations could not have dreamt of.

And I’m curious the role of financial support when it comes to particularly adult children. What are the rules of regulation? You have a family that they made a very nice living, they have money right now, they want to spend it on their kids. And now There’s this question that comes up, which is how is it that after giving so much money and support and really a good lifestyle, not a bad lifestyle, that estrangement can emerge from that? What are the mistakes that you see making? And this is particularly in the Jewish community where supporting adult children, particularly in those early years of marriage, is not unheard of.

Joshua Coleman:

Right.

David Bashevkin:

It’s the opposite. It’s very heard of.

Joshua Coleman:

Yes, exactly.

David Bashevkin:

So what are the mistakes of plenty that families make?

Joshua Coleman:

Well, I don’t know that the mistakes of plenty necessarily increase the risk of estrangement beyond the fact that it can give the child the kind of financial independence where they can later reject the parent. There was a study done by Annette Lareau, who’s a sociologist at University of Pennsylvania or Penn State. I always get confused which one, called Unequal Childhoods, in which she compared middle class versus working class parents. And one of the things she found was that middle class kids and we would assume upper middle class into wealthier family kids, basically didn’t really give very much credit to how well their lives turned out, whereas working class kids did.

And there is some research to show that the wealthier you are, the more individualistic you become, the more you sort of assume that your happiness is the most important thing no matter what, A. And B, you also assume that the success that you’ve had is through your own talents and efforts, despite the fact that it was your parents’ sacrifices who sent you to an Ivy League school or college or paid for the down payment on your house if not bought a house.

And I work with plenty of families, Jewish families where the parents have been incredibly generous, literally giving their kids in some cases millions, other cases paying for expensive education, private schools, schools for the grandchildren. And then later that’s viewed as basically nothing if the child decides to estrange, and the parent understandably feels like, “Well after all I’ve done for you, this is how I get treated.” Which unfortunately isn’t a very persuasive anger these days.

So to back up to your question, how does wealth kind of intersect? I think it intersects in this sociological phenomenon whereby the more money and financial independence people have, the less sense of obligation they might feel towards the parents and the more they might carry this belief that they’re self-made rather than made by din of the fact that their parents really sacrificed for them.

David Bashevkin:

I’m curious in a setting, I experienced the same thing whenever I hear about divorce, thank God my parents are quite happily married, but many people who are very close to me, as I’m sure many of our listeners, have divorced, and whenever I hear a story about divorce I always listen and I’m like, “Both sides. The truth is somewhere in the middle.” I never really know.

And I’m curious in your work in estrangement, I can only multiply that by a thousand where you have the parent child relationship. And to me, if I know if I sat down with a parent, I would probably hear a very compelling story. And if I sat down with the child, I also would hear a really compelling story for why the current status quo was either the worst thing or the best thing for whoever’s telling the story. And I’m curious how you as a psychologist determine, so to speak, who’s right? How do you know whether or not the status quo, the estrangement, the distance, how do you figure out if it’s justified or not?

Joshua Coleman:

Well perhaps you’ve heard this story of the couple that comes to the rabbi for marriage counseling and the rabbi listens and at the end he goes, “I think the husband is actually right,” and they nod and leave and the wife’s unhappy. The next week they come in and the rabbi listens and this time he says, “Well, I think the wife is actually right.” And they leave and the husband’s unhappy and the wife goes, “What? One week the husband’s right, the next week the wife is right, we can’t both be right.” And he says to the wife, “Well, you know what? I think You’re right.”

David Bashevkin:

Not only have I heard that story, but I have actually been accused of being that rabbi. That is literally the way I approach anytime, I’m like, “I don’t know, it sounds like everybody has a truth here.”

Joshua Coleman:

Well, that’s actually the right approach because where we should land isn’t who’s right and who’s wrong, I mean there is a place for that, but typically it’s about promoting understanding. Whether it’s with a couple or between a parent and an adult child. But here’s the complex part of it, is that parents don’t have the same kind of power and authority to demand that kind of reciprocity from their adult child that we might in marriage.

So typically if I’m beginning family therapy between an estranged adult child and the parents, I’ll tell the parents, “Look, this isn’t marriage therapy where you’re going to have an equal say and equal demand for empathy and where you’re going to come out, you get to make equal requests about how the relationship is going to be. Certainly not in the beginning. Maybe if we can get far enough down the line. It’s mostly about your empathizing with why your child feels the way that they do, taking responsibility, showing empathy, showing a desire to repair, finding the kernel if not the bushel of truth.”

And so from that perspective, the child really gets to be right until they feel really understood. And then maybe, but maybe not, the parent’s going to be able to talk about what the relationship feels like to them or what the child themselves evoke in the parent. There’s a sort of a newer line of research and psychology, which is for the longest time we looked at parent to child effects in terms of how parental behavior affects child outcome, but now we’re looking more at what kind of children negatively impact parenting?

And kids for example who had ADHD, who are oppositional and defiant, who have callous and emotional traits, are much more likely to evoke problematic parental behavior. And the now grown child might say, “Oh, well you were so unsympathetic or whatever.” Well, it’s in part because the child is so difficult. Well, the parent may never really be able to talk about what it was like for them because they may risk the relationship with the child.

Again, there’s this huge disparity in terms of who gets to be understood. So on the one hand, I am assuming that both people have a right to be understood and empathized with, and I do my very best to help the adult child empathize with the parent. But I’m very clear with both of them that our task, at least in family therapy, and I would say to most parents who find themselves in a strained relationship with their adult child, the task is really for the parent has to go first. And partly it’s because I also believe that the buck stops with us as parents. Once we have children it kind of is incumbent on us to take the lead.

David Bashevkin:

You’re talking about the role of a parent. It’s not the same as marriage therapy. There is a power dynamic so to speak, and the parent has to go first. Let’s talk about a imagined case and I’m curious about what the first move is supposed to be.

You have a relationship that has deteriorated, they’re not really in touch. I don’t know, maybe they call each other once a year in a perfunctory way and you can hear the sighs on the other end of the phone. I’m assuming we’re dealing with decent people, not evil people-

Joshua Coleman:

Right.

David Bashevkin:

People who want it to be better. What’s the first move? Is the first move saying, “We should go to therapy together?” Is the first move to take accountability? I mean, there’s a difficulty particularly with adult children in that adult children usually means you have older parents.

Joshua Coleman:

Right.

David Bashevkin:

And sometimes it’s very hard for older parents to take accountability for things that happen 50 years ago, 40 years ago. Their mind doesn’t even work that way. A, I don’t know who that person was. I don’t remember any of this. I tried my best. They can’t even access the transgressions anymore.

Joshua Coleman:

Right.

David Bashevkin:

So what’s the first move in reconciliation? Just, like, we booked an appointment at a therapist, let’s go together. How do you start it?

Joshua Coleman:

Well typically, I mean if the adult child isn’t talking to the parent, they might not be willing to start up with family therapy. Some would, but often the adult child needs to hear from the parent that they’re going to take some responsibility if there’s going to be any chance of reconciliation. So what I typically have parents do is write what I call a letter of amends where they find, again, the kernel if not the bushel of truth in the child’s complaints. They start the letter by saying something like, “I know you wouldn’t have cut off contact unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.”

A lot of parents go, “What? Healthiest thing for them to do? It’s not a healthy thing for them to do.” But from the adult child’s perspective it may feel like the healthiest thing for them to do, if not the only thing for them to do. Some estrangements happen because the adult child marries somebody who says, “Choose them or me, you can’t have both.” So in that situation they feel like they’re kind of caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

So parents have to take the lead, and if they know what the complaints are, then they have to speak to it in a very direct courageous way. They can’t say, “Maybe I wasn’t a perfect parent but I did the best I could.” It has to be much more, “It’s clear that when I got angry at you that it was far more hurtful to you than I realized,” or, “I could see how that would’ve been more frightening to you than I had considered.” Or, “When your mother and I divorced, I can see how you might’ve wished that I had worked harder to keep the family together.”

And sometimes parents have no idea what it is. In those cases, I encourage the parent to write what I call a flush them out of the bushes letter, where you’d start out by saying, “I know you wouldn’t do this. It’s the healthiest thing for you to do, that said, I don’t completely understand why you need to not be in contact with me, but I’d like to. It’s clear that I have significant blind spots that I don’t understand. But I’m wondering if you would be comfortable telling me more about what you’re thinking is. I promise to listen without being defensive in just in order to understand, or if you feel like it would be helpful to do this with a family therapist, I would welcome that as well, or if there’s things that you’d like me to be working on in my own therapy.”

So again, if we’re thinking about this from the adult child’s perspective, the adult child feels like to be in contact with the parent isn’t good for the mental health, it makes them feel too anxious or upset or they’re still mad that the parent hasn’t really taken responsibility. So from the adult child’s perspective, they need to really feel and see that the parent has reckoned with some difficult truths about themselves and their character flaws. And these are not easy letters for parents to write. I mean, I wrote a few to my daughter and no parent wants to be faced with the ways that they’ve hurt their child or let them down or caused them to feel upset, particularly if they feel as many parents do, in some ways they did a decent job as a parent, et cetera.

But it’s still important to do. And again, this ties back to what we talked about at the beginning, which is this huge cultural shift where parents can no longer demand closeness. They have to accept that the ground has shifted, that relationships are predicated much more on whether or not that relationship is in line with that adult child’s feelings of mental health and happiness and wellbeing.

David Bashevkin:

Do you feel that there are ever situations where estrangement is warranted?

Joshua Coleman:

I do. It’s never my wish that somebody be estranged, but I occasionally will work with an adult child where a parent is so critical, so negative, so aggressive, so unrepentant, so unwilling to take any responsibility, where for the adult child to be in contact with them basically means that they have to live a life in complete subjugation of the parent. Even though parents, we can feel like we don’t have very much power, particularly if our kids cut us off, we still have enormous power to hurt them. So parents have to understand that they still have enormous power and sometimes when adult children cut off contact, they’re doing it to protect themselves from the parent’s power to hurt them.

Yeah, so a parent who’s completely unrepentant, who just blames, who shames, who rejects the child and maybe who they’ve married, which I’ve seen sometimes, and expects to still have a close relationship with that child isn’t, in all likelihood, today going to get that. And then there have been situations where I have supported that and told the parents directly, “Look, you can’t have it both ways. Your adult child is willing to open the door to you, but you’re going to have to be willing and open to do things differently. You get to decide whether it’s worth it to you to maintain your values about this.” Whether they’re against that child’s religion or who they married or maybe it’s their gender identity or their sexuality or their political beliefs. There’s a lot of different ways people become estranged today-

David Bashevkin:

Sure.

Joshua Coleman:

… that weren’t true before. I tell parents, “You get to decide to choose your values over your child,” but I might not even add, “You might not like the consequence.” But I tell parents, “It’s binary, there’s not a third option. You don’t get to both reject your child and expect them to still want to be close to you.”

David Bashevkin:

I understand the parents’ instinctive need, and I also understand the obvious blind spots that a parent has to their parenting. My children are fairly young, I think I’m a great parent, but I have no doubt by the age of 10, he probably has … he’s built a case already. You’ve messed up like everybody else, you don’t have to wait until you’re an adult. But I’m curious, when you speak to an adult child and they come in and they actually don’t want a relationship with a parent. They’re married, they have a family of their own, their parent, let’s again assume was not criminally abusive in ways that are dangerous, but critical, unhealthy, gas-lighting, all the terms that you mentioned that can be weaponized into a formal pathology.

How do you make the case to a child for why they should even want to reconcile with a parent? The parent is sitting there in agony because of their blind spots that allow them to kind of say, “I did the best I could and I want a relationship.” But now you have a child whose memory, as flawed as it may be, has all of this negativity that they’re carrying, and They’re coming to you to get rid of that negativity, probably for individual therapy. And they say, “And by the way, I’m not in touch with my parents. I cut them off, we speak, I don’t know, once a year, once every five years, we send a text message, I send them pictures of the kids, whatever, it’s very distant.”

How do you make the case to a child if they are doing reasonably well, why a relationship with a parent is even worth the pain of reconciliation because it is a painful road.

Joshua Coleman:

Yeah.

David Bashevkin:

So why is it necessary?

Joshua Coleman:

I don’t necessarily make a case for it. The strongest case I make is that I think that it’s healthy for adult children to directly face their parents with their complaints with me present, because I know if I’m present, I can help them to voice their complaints in a way that the parent is more likely to hear. And I can also support the parent in listening in a way that makes a conversation be productive. So so much of my theory and strategies are oriented around helping these conversations be productive.

So if I’m working with the adult child, I’ll say, “If you come in saying, oh, you’re a narcissist, you’re emotionally abusive, you’re a gas-lighter, you’re just going to make your parent feel defensive. If you can talk about it from the perspective that these are the things that you feel like you want your parent to change, to recognize, you can talk about whatever it is you feel like they did right for you.”

Because all parents are defensive, all parents feel scared that they failed their children. And when faced with that reality feel terrible, that makes them defensive. So my goal is to have a productive conversation. So what I say to the adult child is, “I think It’s therapeutic for you to be able to face your parent with these things, with my support. I also want to talk to your parents ahead of time and say to them, ‘look, when your child tells you their complaints, don’t defend, don’t explain. Work to understand, to empathize, to hear them out, to give them a platform where they can feel like you’re really open and willing to self-reflect and to reconcile. Otherwise you don’t have a chance.’”

So I pitch it to the adult child that it’s therapeutic for them to be able to kind of take the parent on. But I also pitch it to the parent that it’s their only chance of potential reconciliation. The other point that I don’t really make to the adult child, except by way of just outlining it, is that what most people don’t understand about estrangement today is that estrangements fracture whole family systems. It’s rarely just between the parent and the adult child. Typically, if a adult child cuts off the parent and there’s grandchildren involved, those grandchildren may never see those grandparents again. Even if they were loving, dedicated grandparents by the adult child’s own admission.

So that’s an enormous fracture, but sometimes siblings will line up one in support of the estranged adult child, another in support of the parents, grandparents, same thing. Or sometimes the adult child cuts off everybody in the family and family friends. So estrangement is not a trivial thing. So sometimes in the media, I’ll read about, “Oh, should I cut off my toxic parent, et cetera,” it’s like, well the question should really be, should I engage in an act which is going to completely fracture my whole family and in many ways, weaken my relationships of my children to grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Because that’s often what estrangement is.

David Bashevkin:

Let me actually ask you, it was going to be my next question, which is the role of siblings. Very often in cases like this, the estrangement is localized, it’s a child to a parent and they continue to have good relationships with the sibling. And those siblings are able because they have different emotional capacity. Maybe they were raised in a different home, in terms of years. They’re the oldest, they’re the youngest or whatever it is, the parent, they used to be wealthy and now they’re more modest or they were modest and then they became wealthy. And you could literally have siblings who were raised in different homes and have drastically different relationships with a parent. What, if any, should be the disposition and responsibility of a sibling in advocating for reconciliation?

Joshua Coleman:

Well, typically they can’t, because typically the adult child who’s estranged themselves from the parent will say that they don’t want them to be in that role. And if they persist in that role, that they’re going to cut them off too. And that is typically what happens, not only for siblings but for grandparents, aunts, uncles, anybody else who puts themselves in that position. So what I typically tell parents is, “You can’t really get anybody to advocate for you.”

And what I tell people who are … sometimes parents will say, “Well, my parents were invited to my child’s graduation or wedding, but I wasn’t. I don’t want them to go as a show of support to me,” and I’m like, “If they want to go, let them go. First of all, your child will blame you if your parents don’t show. Second of all, the fewer the degrees of separation, the better.”

So it’s better to have some people in contact with an estranged adult child than no people, because it can very quickly turn to no people. If the estranged sibling is going to be in any kind of a role, they might say something like, “Look, I don’t want you to have to choose between mom and dad and me or I don’t want to have to choose either. I do think that they’re in therapy, they’re willing to work on things. They’re not talking about this in some blaming, martyred way.”

And I often coach parents when they do talk to their siblings and other family members not to blame or vilify the estranged adult child, to talk about them in a compassionate way so that people who are in contact can say that, because that’s going to make the climate much better for these estranged adult child to want to return to.

But in general, siblings don’t have the kind of … but even revered grandparents don’t have the kind of power one might think that they would have. So the best that they can say is, “Look, you don’t have to choose, I assume you have reasons for your complaints. I also know that your mother or your father are in a lot of pain and they’re willing to work on things and I hope that some point, you’re willing to do that.” That’s about as much as they can say.

David Bashevkin:

I’m, wondering if you could speak a little bit about what is the psychological loss of that family unit when it fractures? There’s a lot of attention, and it’s part of the optionality that modernity offers, where you get to choose-

David Bashevkin:

It’s part of the optionality that modernity offers, where you get to choose your friends and choose your community, and the one unchosen relationship that you have is family. And I could see a lot of people really buying into this, as like, “Why don’t I just cut off this one unchosen relationship and just keep all the choices around me? I chose my spouse, I chose romantic relationships, I chose friendships, I chose community, and just keep myself surrounded by the choices that I proactively made.”

What is the case, so to speak, for why the unchosen relationship of family, with all of the negativity that necessarily comes when something is unchosen, what is the case for why those relationships are important in somebody’s life? Why isn’t the individualistic choosing optionality the right approach?

Joshua Coleman:

No, I think It’s a great question. My answer is that we have enormously high rates of mental illness in this country, and I think it’s in part because there are very individualistic orientation where we’re constantly being advised to cut off anybody who crosses our boundaries, who in any ways causes us to feel anxious or depressed or doubt ourselves.

And I don’t think that that builds resilience. I don’t think it leads to mental health even though it’s pitched as a preservation of one’s mental health and happiness. There’s research by Iris Mauss in the USS at UC Berkeley, and she found that in those countries where happiness is defined as a form of social engagement like with friends or family, versus more individualistic pursuits of happiness, those countries have much higher rates of happiness and that’s in part because one of the things we know from sociology and economics is that it’s really our relationships, it’s our closeness with others, that can build happiness and wellbeing.

That’s part of it. The other part is that as much as there are truly, as we’ve talked about, destructive parents, I would say probably the majority of parents who are getting estranged today weren’t child molesters or physically abusive people, they’re being cut off because of political differences or because, in some ways, they trigger their adult child with feelings of anxiety or guilt or some other kind of feeling that we know from cognitive behavior therapy, that going towards the things you’re most anxious about or fearful about actually builds in resilience. So, part of what people are doing when they estrange themselves, they’re sort of acting like they’re doing something in line with their mental health, but they’re actually just participating and making themselves even more fragile.

The third part of that answer is kind of, what kind of a society do we want to live on? The parents in my practice are miserable. Every day I’m talking with parents, literally every single day if not every single hour, parents who are sobbing, saying, “How can I live without my child, my grandchild? I’m willing to do anything, I’m willing to walk over hot coals,” and they are willing to.

And I don’t think my practice is some weird subset of estranged parents. I mean, obviously they are people who are educated enough to read and to research and to find me, so in that set they probably are, but I’d probably argue that middle class and upper class parents are more at risk for some of the reasons you and I were talking about earlier, but they’re completely immiserated by their child’s estrangement, and why don’t, as a society, we care about that? Why is the only thing that matters in our culture whether or not the adult child feels happy and is doing something in line with their mental health, particularly if it’s a parent who’s willing to do the work, is willing to do individual therapy in family therapy, why isn’t that much more of a conversation?

And then the fourth is the point we were talking about earlier, the way that, yes, your decision may help you but it may cut off your children from potentially loving involved grandparents and are people who weren’t great parents but are amazing grandparents, and that’s not only good for the grandchild, but it also gives the grandparent a way to kind of resuscitate some aspirations that they had for being a good parent, to provide value to their adult child in ways maybe they couldn’t have when their children were growing up, so it just fractures whole family systems and makes us much more divided as a society. That’s how I would think about all those things.

David Bashevkin:

You spoke a lot about the steps for a parent, I’m curious if there are any steps for a child who wants that relationship but knows that it needs some boundaries, knows that it can’t be amorphous or we’re going to fall back into old patterns of great negativity.

Are there recommended boundaries that you offer children that they could suggest to their parents? Not in anger, not with an intensity, but, “I do want to have a relationship but it needs a form, it needs an entry, it needs a doorway. I can’t feel like I’m out in the wilderness and you’re able to just come and torment, so to speak, and get back to our old ways when I was living in your house.” What are the most productive and efficient boundaries that children could establish so they could find or journey in the road back to reconciliation?

Joshua Coleman:

I think the part that you raised in the beginning of the question is the most crucial, which is to approach your parent with affection. We know from research on couples that John Gottman has done, he says, “Avoid the harsh startup if you’re wanting to complain to your partner about something that’s bothering you.”

Well, the same is true with an adult child to a parent. Avoid the harsh startup. Don’t come in saying, “I hate this about you and you’ve ruined my life and you were a terrible parent.” It’s far better to come in with some expression of love or affection or a compliment, or the thing I love about you as a parent is X or Y, the thing I got the most from you is A or B, or I know that you love me a lot and care a lot about my happiness. The complaint sandwich, there’s a lot of wisdom in the complaint sandwich.

You start with a compliment. It’s a way of saying, “Look, I’m not coming in to attack you and shame you and humiliate you, even though it’s probably what it’s going to feel like,” and then say the complaint, but in fairly neutral language, use what we psychologists call I statements, which is not, “You’re a bad parent,” but, “when I tell you that I don’t want you to criticize me for not being as available as you want me to, it hurts my feelings, it makes me feel like you’re saying I’m a bad child,” rather than you’re just a terrible parent because it puts the responsibility on the behavior of the parent, but how it makes you feel.

And then end with, “I’m glad that you were able to give me some space to talk about this,” but to sort of stay consistent and be what, in this training we’d call, just being a broken record. It’s like if the parent’s not getting it, as we’ve talked about last time, when you do that, it makes me feel like you’re actually not respectful of my request to be engaged with you. I do want to have a close relationship with you, but you make it really hard when you’re critical of me or my parenting or you guilt trip me about not being as available to you as you like.

So, being really mindful that even the smallest complaint to a parent is probably going to feel humiliating and scary to them and invoke intense feelings of shame and guilt, but also, to know that sometimes you still have to complain, so I think that those are the main things, I would say.

David Bashevkin:

I love the idea of a complaint sandwich. I’d never thought of it before, but actually, Yom Kippur itself, as you were saying it, I was looking at it, there’s actually a special commandment or tradition to eat before Yom Kippur, and then we eat obviously after Yom Kippur, where Yom Kippur is kind of working out the tension in the relationship, so to speak, but both before and after there’s a joyousness, both leading up to it, so Yom Kippur itself is a complaint sandwich.

I want to know more about the actual boundaries that could help facilitate the conversation. Would you recommend the child… Maybe you’re not ready to have an unmediated conversation, but maybe you could tell your parent, “Let’s speak on Thursdays or Sundays or why don’t you come over to us or we come over to you?” Do you find those type of boundaries where you try to almost carve out a space for the healthy relationship, are there ways to do it effectively, ones that have worked, or does the very notion of boundary kind of make it feel too superficial?

Joshua Coleman:

I think it makes it too superficial. The parent may feel sort of hurt or controlled by kind of like, “Oh, what, you have to… I’m your mother, you’re going to set a boundary on me, what is this?” But it may be necessary for a potential relationship. Yeah, I think that those are reasonable examples for some adult children if they’re going to visit their parents from another state, they may decide not to stay at the parents’ house because it’s just too disruptive or they get too triggered by the parents, so it might be, “Look, we’re just going to stay at a hotel. We love your house, but we find that having some time just to kind of collect ourselves before and after is useful.”

And that would be in a case where the parent’s really just not able to show any insight or self-reflection or willingness to get corrective feedback. Sometimes adult children have to sort of just accept that their parents are just never going to be able, they’re just not psychologically healthy enough to do it, even if they’re reasonable people in other ways, they just can’t take responsibility. Not everybody can, so in that situation, in some ways, the adult child might be better off just doing what they need to do and facing and accepting the fact that the parent may not like it because it preserves their relationship rather than doing what the parent wants, but then feeling really resentful afterwards.

David Bashevkin:

Just the wisdom and depth and substance and empathy that you offer in what is really just such a horrific break in one of the most self-sustaining, nourishing relationships in our lives is really incredible, and I really encourage-

Joshua Coleman:

Thank you.

David Bashevkin:

Our listeners to find your books, your writings, they’re, really, really wonderful. I’m curious if there are just any parting words that you could give to parents and children who are each stuck in their corner, they’re not yet ready to even about face and turn towards each other in their respective corners. Is there any encouragement or idea that you can give that just motivates to start the engine of the relationship of turning towards each other?

Joshua Coleman:

Yeah, to the adult child, my wish is that adult children could see that parents really did do the best that they could do, even if that best was terrible. That we’re all sort of victims of our genetics and our own childhoods and our socioeconomic class and our marriages and our peer group. There’s so many things that goes into creating a self, and many parents who make terrible mistakes, didn’t do it because they wanted their child to suffer. And I think in a fair world they would be shown compassion by their adult children and their adult children would have that in the back of their mind as a place of forgiveness for the parent. That doesn’t mean that they can’t push for change, but that they could use that as sort of an engine towards moving toward the parent.

Towards the parent, the goal is to really understand how much the culture has changed. And a lot of parents, dads in particular, will act like, “Well, I’m not going to humiliate myself by apologizing, they can apologize to me.” And what I commonly tell parents is, it’s not about humiliation, it’s about humility. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “It’s clear that I had significant blind spots. I wasn’t aware that this was so hurtful to you, that when I say that, that that’s so harmful to you, is so triggering to you. I’m, glad you let me know. That’s certainly something I can work on.”

Sort of remove it from sort of the older ideas around respect and authority, which, that ship has sailed, more towards just more collaborative, egalitarian mental health perspective. And the reality is that those parents who can make that shift, and many can if they’re given the chance, find that they can have a really much closer relationship with their adult child than they even thought possible, and the adult child can have a far deeper relationship with their parents than they thought possible, so it can really be a win-win all around.

David Bashevkin:

Dr. Joshua Coleman, I cannot thank you enough for your wisdom, your work, your writings, your scholarship. It is really something that each individual family, we hope most families are not estranged, but there’s a lot of wisdom, even in that pre-stage, the tension that every family relationship brings, that make your work and your ideas so incredibly valuable and I’m so grateful for you sharing them with me today.

Joshua Coleman:

Well, thank you, it was an honor to be here, I’m so glad that you had me on.

David Bashevkin:

I was very taken with the conversation with Dr. Coleman. This is somebody who has dedicated his life to healing families. I think the notion of writing a letter of amends is something that for a lot of families seems very daunting, but any family who’s been through the cycle of Yom Kippur and the Yamim Noraim, the High Holidays, it’s, not quite that outlandish, and I would humbly suggest that it is something that we should consider even if we are not fully estranged. A letter of amends or even a letter of gratitude where we highlight and appreciate and thank our parents, thank our siblings, thank our family.

I find very often, sometimes teshuvah focuses on those who are the most distant from us. I don’t know, somebody, an old business partner who we got into a fight with, somebody who we got an overt disappointment with, and we go through life and we disappoint many people. And sometimes the people who are kind of overlooked in the mechilahprocess, in the process of forgiveness, are the people who are most close to us, the people who we interact with the most and those who we love the most, honestly, over the course of time have the most opportunities to disappoint, to frustrate, to bother, and to take a moment before the Yamim Noraim.

And whether it’s a letter of amends, a letter of gratitude, both, a phone call, where we ask mechila in a real way from those who are closest to us. There’s so much hurt that we all carry, there’s so many fights that take place in families that are solvable, that we can reconcile, that we can heal from. I have constantly in my office people who are going through, where they’re in these high-pressure situations, maybe it’s before a family simcha, maybe it’s right after a get together, and we all spent a lot of times together, we all got on everybody’s nerves, as all family relationships, and when you’re in close proximity, especially when you’re adults, oftentimes leads to…

And take a moment to really reach out with open-heartedness, without necessarily blaming and guilt, but with open-heartedness. And to begin to heal is something, this is the work of holiness. This is the work of divinity, of being able to heal ruptures within a family. And I can’t think of a greater merit than to enter into the High Holidays than with real reconciliation between families and to come wholeheartedly as one before HaKadosh Baruch Hu, before God, as one unit. How could we come before HaKadosh Baruch Hu if we’re not able to speak to a sibling, to a parent, to a loved one, to a spouse, and then we turn to God and ask for forgiveness? The road to forgiveness before HaKadosh Baruch Hu begins with those who are closest to us, our family members, our closest friends. And finding a way to reconcile and heal, as Dr. Coleman laid out, I think is something extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily holy.

There is an incredible story that took place in Broken Ties and that really is the segue to our next guest where one of the coaches that they work with, an extraordinary person who I spoke with briefly, his name is Jason Blau, you can find his work at jasonblaucoaching.com, spelled B-L-A-U, and he’s somebody who works closely with Broken Ties and coaching families to come together.

And what is most remarkable about his story and what we discuss is how his work with Broken Ties actually transformed his own life and his own relationship, not familially, but his relationship with God and with Jewish life and with Yiddishkeit itself. So, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce another very important conversation with somebody who was working in the field of familial reconciliation, here is our conversation with Jason Blau.

So, maybe we could start with kind of our community. In the Jewish community, I think particularly in the Orthodox community where I certainly reside, I’m trying to understand specifically the causes of estrangement? How does this happen? There’s an instinctive love that you have for your family, but those closest to you have the most opportunities to disappoint you, so I’m curious, in your work in this field, are there typical pressures that lead to familial estrangement?

Jason Blau:

So, this is a big question and it probably has a few avenues. There are many reasons why I believe that estrangement happens, but I think it’s first important to note that how the parent or parents see the situation is very different than how the child or the estranged child, adults, in our case, are seeing the situation. Meaning that the estrangement is only viewed by the parent themselves. The child sees this very differently. Most of the children that I work with or have the opportunity to speak to see this as an opportunity to honor their boundaries, to stop generational trauma, to protect themselves from toxic parents and to honor their own emotional boundaries that they are now capable of setting forth for themselves.

I think one of the challenges with the generation that we live in is that we’re speaking a totally different language from those that are 30, 40 years older than us. So, I think one of the biggest challenges in this topic of parent alienation and family estrangement is a lack of communication, effective communication, communication where two sides of the issue are speaking the same language. We live in a generation of me and I, I want to show up the way I want to, you should see me for who I want to be, and in our community, if you think about this, this is a stark difference than the way, I’ll say even my parents grew up, and my grandparents, which is, “You honor thy mother and father.”

I remember my father used to say, when I questioned him, I would say, “Why do I have to do this?” And he would say, “Well, because I’m the father, that’s why?” And today, it’s almost like, “I don’t have to do what you say, I’ll do what I want.” And I think that’s one of the biggest drivers behind this estrangement or these strained relationships, is a difference in generations. I think another big idea in the communities that we are in, these religious communities, is that there’s a system in place. And the system traditionally has been, at least from my perspective as an outsider, as a baal teshuva, I’ve seen it where there’s been an idea of closed systems, there’s no access to the internet, everybody’s using a flip phone. But today, with the access of the internet and the messaging out there and this idea that you could be whoever you want to be is really diametrically opposed to what the system says it should be.

I think additionally, if I just go one step further, we have an issue because although in our Jewish communities we have great schooling and the system really lends itself to producing such great people with these great minds of wisdom and Torah, we fail in this environment to educate the children and the youth, so to speak, about emotions, how to express their emotions, how to ask for what they want in a kind way rather than demanding it or only seeing themselves in the equation. So, of course, divorce and past traumas and all of these things are certainly a cause, but within our communities, I think you can see that there’s a higher dynamic here at play.

David Bashevkin:

You mentioned, and this really fascinated to me because when I reached out to the founders of Broken Ties, they had also mentioned it in passing that you are a baal teshuva, you did not grow up within the Orthodox community and joined it later. And one of the things that fascinated me was, if you’re doing work in broken families, I would think the one community you would never want to join is the Orthodox community because your work is you’re seeing families that are getting torn apart over religious issues, and to a relative outsider, you’re like, “What’s going on, you don’t want to eat at your parents’ house, you don’t want your kids to come over because they’re wearing a pair of jeans?”

I would’ve expected that somebody involved in your work would’ve helped the Orthodox community but would’ve run in the other direction. Why would somebody who is involved in your line of work decide to join the community that you so often are serving?

Jason Blau:

First of all, Broken Ties is an incredible organization. I think they serve just under 1000 families and I know that number is growing exponentially by the week. When I first found Broken Ties, it was sort of by accident, mistake, somebody had asked me to join a monthly Zoom call which Broken Ties supports just to give parents some support.

David Bashevkin:

And were you part of the Orthodox community at this time?

Jason Blau:

I was not, so this is just a few years ago. I joined Broken Ties about four and a half years ago, and when I had begun working with the organization and with the members of the organization, I was a regular secular guy. I had been through my own journey of estrangement, meaning that I, myself, at different times pushed both my mother and father away for different reasons.

And baruch Hashem, things have really worked themselves out and I use a lot of the techniques that I’ve used within my own relationship to empower the families that I work with. But when I began with Broken Ties, I remember wearing a polo shirt, I think maybe a purple one at the time, and when I opened up my Zoom camera, there were 50, 60 Chassidish and religious families sitting on the other end. And I had begun to give over some ideas, things that might help them to calm down, to de-stress, to be able to understand seeing it from a different perspective would change what they’re seeing in their experience and so on and so forth.

And in doing so, I used to get one by one phone calls that said, “Hey, we like your ideas, we’d like to work with you one on one.” And that really was the beginning of building this coaching business. I’m a coach of parent alienation and family estrangement, you want to talk about having a niche.

And so, I began to give over a lot of the tools that I had acquired by really learning, I have a master’s degree in communication and leadership and identity, and even working as an entrepreneur and in sales, these tools actually are highly effective in reconnection or reunification. And in doing so, in opening myself up and offering these tools, one by one my clients were saying, “Hey, how do you know this information?” And at first I thought they were sort of challenging me, “Are you qualified enough to be doing this?” And instead what they were asking was, “Hey, where’s the basis of this because what you’re saying has its roots deeply in Torah.”

And so, when I asked, “Show me, show me the Torah.” And they said, “You have to find a rabbi to show you.” And in doing so, I said, “Okay, show me the rabbi.” And that’s really where I started for the benefit of being able to support my religious clients. I had no intention of being religious whatsoever, I just wanted to be able to not lead people astray, have the language, have an understanding, who are these people, what are they really about? I never had seen anybody in a religious world, so I was going to learn. I remember speaking with this rabbi who lives in Lakewood, incredible rabbi I still work with every week. I remember him saying when I met with him, “Hey, I’m a secular guy, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I want to support these people.” And he said, “I only have one question.” And that question was, “What’s your address?”

And in the mail a couple of days later came a Chumash and a book by Dr. Lieberman on Bachira. And I remember asking him, “Okay, Rabbi, now what?” And he says, “Page one.” And we opened the homage and we started to learn. And in doing so, I begun to found some level of interest in Torah. In fact, so much so that these were in the beginning of the COVID days when my young daughter was home with me. She was learning by remote learning, by Zoom, and I remember, because a lot of these members of Broken Ties and the people that I was working with, these people were not only estranged and alienated from their children but also from their grandchildren.

And so, I remember first it was like a hello and a hi from my daughter onto a member of Broken Ties or somebody I was working with. But soon after that my daughter would sit on Friday before Shabbos and give some nachas to some of these grandparents and build her own relationships with a lot of the clients that I was working with. And in doing so, they would send her tznius clothing, they would send us all the things that we needed. They would ask us about, “Are you keeping Shabbos, tefillin?” And at first we’re like, “No, we don’t really know much about that.” But as we went, we got educated, so I didn’t see this as an avenue of becoming religious, it was sort of by accident and helping people and supporting them, we started to learn and understand what was going on religiously and made that choice from there.

David Bashevkin:

But there’s something so beautifully poetic about somebody whose practice was helping those within the Orthodox community deal with familial estrangement and in turn, they turned back and dealt with your own kind of estrangement with your own culture, Yiddishkeit religion and kind of bring you close and then have that reconciliation come in tandem is one of the most remarkable kind of entry points to Yiddishkeit. Even as you’re hearing all the dirty laundry that goes on in families, and I’m sure you’ve heard it all, to kind of see with that, not through it, but with it, to see that beauty and to actually have a reconciliation of sorts of your own, is something that I find so fascinating and so moving.

Tell me a little bit about your techniques. Tell me because there are so many techniques in this field, it’s such a serious problem. I know people who are estranged, it doesn’t mean that you don’t talk to each other ever, but there’s a real distance within the family. And one of the things you told me is not everybody identifies, it’s not like a self like, “Oh, I am now estranged.” You don’t flip a switch and say, “Now, I identify…” What kind of a human being are you? “I’m an American, estranged, a Jew.” It’s not an identity, so how do you have strategies that help address estrangement when it is very possible that the title and the word, the label, estrangement, isn’t even front and center?

Jason Blau:

Yeah, that’s a great question. What I like to do is really try to separate this into a few different parts. The idea is that in total this makes up what I call, and truthfully I don’t even like the word reconnection, because I think the term reconnection itself implies that one person wants to reconnect with another. My terminology is, how we co-create the relationship that works for two people. It has to work for the parent themselves and the adult child and if it doesn’t…

David Bashevkin:

Beautiful.

Jason Blau:

You’re going to move in and out of the relationship, or what we call the, quote, normal relationship over time, so I think that’s important to understand that this has to be on both sides.

David Bashevkin:

And to co-create a relationship, that is such beautiful language, it’s literally the relationship of a bris, a covenant, to start a covenant, to recreate something new. How do you go about that when you have so much history and baggage?

Jason Blau:

What you’re saying is actually spot on because if you think about it just a little bit further from krumkeit standpoint, we’re taught kibud av, honor thy mother and father, and here you have a child who on the surface appears to not be doing so, they’re not being respectful, they’re not calling Tatty before Shabbos, they’re not wishing mother a goodYontif and that’s a real issue.

What I always say is that in an estranged situation where there’s true alienation or estrangement of any sort, that it is the parent’s responsibility to do two things. The first thing that the parent must do is be the one to lead the charge towards this co-creation of the relationship. In my work, again, just with my experience, which is over several hundreds of families, it does appear though that because of the dynamic of the relationship, the parent is older, they’re more aware of what’s going on and they desire the relationship so they must be the leader.

They have to lead the charge, which a lot of times puts the parent in a position to have to be like, “Okay, for right now I’m not going to try to prove that I was right and they were wrong, I’m not going to try to get to the deep dark issues that have occurred. But instead, I’m going to take some time with Jason,” and there are many other professionals that are able to do this, “but I’m going to take some time and I’m going to pull back. I’m going to gain a bit of a strategy,” which is really what I call phase one. You have to pull back, you have to learn to calm yourself down. I call this putting your own mask on first and be able to be in the space so that you can hear what your child is saying without reaction or response.

I call that the fight or flight mindset. Can you be in a space where you can hear and not be triggered by the words that your child is speaking most of the time that are negative, rude, disrespectful, and so forth? In saying that, not only do you have to calm yourself down, but you have to begin to arm up. If you were going into war, I don’t like to use this analogy, but if you were going into fight a battle, something that was meaningful and you believed in, you would’ve to gain the tools, the strategies.

And so, really the first part of the work that I do with my clients is to empower them with an understanding, right? An understanding of how to stay present in a tough situation, how to gain perspective, perspective they’re going to need, right? I know my perspective, I’m the parent, I know what I saw, but if I don’t take the time to understand what the child may have seen, then I limit myself. It’s a bit of arrogance rather than a lot of humility, which I think could be gained through the process. We also have to help the client, or my client, to understand what they want, what do they really want and desire here? Most of us focus on things that we don’t want, and as you know, that’s pretty destructive. It’s also a fear-based mindset.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to feel disrespected, I don’t want to feel inadequate.

Jason Blau:

100%.

David Bashevkin:

Instead, focus on what you do want.

Jason Blau:

Of course, of course. Because only when you know what you want, with clarity and specificity, can you begin to align your actions, the actions that you need to take in order to bring you closer or push you further from something that you want, so this is key.

A lot of people say, “Well, should I just think positive, things will be positive?” I said, “Yeah, I love the Yiddish saying as well, but what we’re doing here is trying to get clear and specific for the purpose of taking the right action that will bring us closer to what we want.” And there’s a big piece on fear, overcoming fear. What actually prevents some parents from reconnecting in the first place is they’re so fear ridden, walking on eggshells, so concerned that if they go to the Sheva Brachot, if they go to the simcha, their child’s going to accost them and yell at them, so guess what they do?

David Bashevkin:

They don’t go.

Jason Blau:

They don’t go. And so that in and of itself, and I always say this phase one is so important because Hashem is perfect and there will be an opportunity for you to reconnect with your child. My question that I always ask my clients is, will you be ready with the right tools when that time comes and that’s why this work is so important.

The second thing that I always say the parent needs to do or, I guess it’s the parent or the grandparent in this case, but they need to create and build safety. Now, safety is like the buzzword of the last century, I need to feel safe, and I know probably a lot of people are almost rolling their eyes when they hear me say this, but when I talk about safety, safety is built when there is consistency of action over time. It’s like if you remember back when your kid was young and you did peekaboo, peekaboo, and over and over and over again. It’s not that their child was so interested in seeing your face, although I’m sure they were giggling over this, but it’s that the child knows what to expect, it’s why kids like books read over and over again, they know what to expect.

And so, the work that’s done behind the scenes, the work of the parent is to find ways to show up consistently over and over again so that the child here knows what to expect. And in doing so, that child has an opportunity to begin to open up to the parent to give them the information they need in order to begin the process moving forward, so that’s really a big part of the first phase.

David Bashevkin:

Let me ask you, I’m in my late 30s, I’m not a estranged, I very much love my parents, admire them, but I’m imagining telling my parents anything that even requires more than one phase.

My parents are older and I wonder how do you teach somebody, especially if you’re placing a lot of this on parents, they’re older, how does somebody at this point in their life, I’m not casting aspersion on older people, certainly not my parents, but how do you teach them a new trick at this age?

Jason Blau:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Phase one, phase two, whatever. This idea of phase two is really about the bridge, the connection between the parent and the child. And one of the challenges that I have faced and have begun to help people overcome is there’s a miscommunication on an understanding of what the language is.

For example, one of the communication techniques that I teach so adamantly is an idea called validation. Most people don’t really even know what validation is, so they have to start by really learning the basics, really a new language. And that’s where I start, I really try to power people with an understanding of what it means to validate, why validation is actually important, and then, how can you use validation as the beginning to asking questions that begin to uncover what people, or what the children in this case, mean by what they say?

This really isn’t about teaching the old dog new tricks, it’s not. This is about giving people the ability to learn a technique and practice it so much so that they’re able to do it over time and that’s really where I think I’ve done great work, is being able to support people in not only learning the techniques but practicing them.

The other big thing here we hear about often is boundaries. And I always laugh, I get a mother from time to time from Monsey and she says, “Jason, boundaries, come on, we were 10 people in a two bedroom apartment, what do you mean boundaries?” So, once they understand what the child’s language is, it’s not so much to learn. It’s really about practice and implementation, and I think that’s where people really succeed or fall short, is are they able to take the tools for what they are and implement them in a consistent way over time?

And I think that’s the difference, that’s the differentiator. I work with a rebbetzin, she’s in her 80s and she says, “My child doesn’t kiss my hand when I walk into the room.” Or, “My child doesn’t stand when their father enters.” Okay, so we have to understand where they are and try to meet them there, and that’s really what I try to do is I try to meet the client at the level of understanding and then begin to, step-by-step, that’s why I’ve created these processes, I call it the mindset shift blueprint, it’s a step-by-step guide to help you figure out where you are today and get you to move to where you want to be tomorrow.

David Bashevkin:

Jason, I cannot thank you enough for speaking with me today.

Jason Blau:

100%.

David Bashevkin:

It really means a great deal and your work…

Jason Blau:

100%

David Bashevkin:

Both in estrangement and reconciliation and your larger story of the ultimate reconciliation and kind of reinventing your own life is something I find so deeply moving and I’m so grateful for your time today.

Jason Blau:

Thank you so much for having me.

David Bashevkin:

I’ve said it many times on this podcast. I remember in conversation with Rabbi David Aaron, who we spoke about in our series on God, he said this explicitly, it’s something that my mother used to tell us all the time, that our image of God as the ultimate authority is shaped through the authority that is our parents. And it is not a coincidence that we relate to God as a parent calling and relating to HaKadosh Baruch Hu as Avinu She-Ba-Shamayim, our Father in Heaven, but that relationship is very much shaped and sometimes warped, unfortunately, by the relationship that we have to our actual parents.

And what I found so moving about Jason Blau’s own story is how his relationship to Avinu She-Ba-Shamayim, HaKadosh Baruch Hu, to God, to Divinity, to Yiddishkeit itself, was shaped through his work with Broken Ties and reshaped and re-imagined and rebuilt a new relationship, which is what reconciliation sometimes is all about.

It’s not necessarily about taking the shards of that old relationship and piecing it back together, but finding a way that with each of our emotional resources and capacity, to find a way that maybe we could build something new, have a new covenant, a new bris with one another, a new pathway for a relationship, and a new way to come before the ultimate parent, Avinu She-Ba-Shamayim, HaKadosh Baruch Hu, and our relationship to Yiddishkeit and our past and Amcha Yisrael, the larger body of the Jewish people that spans generations, that sometimes for us we’re born and we have a frustration in our very Jewish identity.

But what reconciliation is all about, as we said from the outset, it’s about transforming those ghosts, those ideas that haunt us into ancestors. And instead of being haunted by our past, but allowing our past and whether our past is our Jewish identity, whether that’s our siblings or our relationship to Yiddishkeit and HaKadosh Baruch Hu, God Himself, to allow that past not to haunt, but instead to nourish.

I want to end this episode with a conversation with somebody who is incredibly special and dear to me. His name is Izzy Posen. I met him online and we got to meet once in person when I was visiting London, staying at the incredible community of Rabbi Harvey Belovski and had an incredible Shabbos with him and his family. And on Sunday morning, I got a minute to meet somebody who grew up within the Hasidic community, left the community, was no longer Hasidic, not religiously affiliated in that way anymore, but somebody who I always found extraordinarily thoughtful.

Tragically, Izzy’s mother was tragically killed in a very unexpected, very tragic car accident a little over a month ago, and Izzy, who shared a lot of his-

David Bashevkin:

… her accident, a little over a month ago. And Izzy, who’s shared a lot of his story and his journey, has been sharing poetry online and stories online about his relationship with his mother and her efforts to create reconciliation within his family. The pain of families, especially with children who left, is extraordinarily real. I don’t mean to minimize that for one second, which is why it’s so important to talk about. But he shared in a way that was so openhearted, so respectful, so thoughtful, that I reached out to him and said, “Can we speak together? Let’s do this to perpetuate the memory, the legacy, the mission of your mother, Miriam Posen.” Who, I just see from their pictures together, must have been such an incredible person. So it is my absolute privilege to introduce our conversation with Izzy Posen.

You are a friend from afar and somebody who knows both the pain of estrangement and the work that’s needed for reconciliation. I wanted to begin with your upbringing. Tell me a little bit about the world that you grew up in.

Izzy Posen:

Yeah. So the Stamford community is a very vibrant community, very Hasidic community, and it’s on the conservative end of the Hasidic spectrum. We always joke that Stamford Hill is like 10 or 20 years behind Williamsburg in terms of conservative and progressing with the times. It’s a very close-knit community. It’s much smaller than the American Hasidic centers, so people know each other, families know each other. When you meet another person, you always say, “So you’re the Posen. Which one? So your father is this one,” and you immediately know the whole family.

David Bashevkin:

Gotcha.

Izzy Posen:

 With being tight-knit, there’s good things that come with it. It means that everyone supports each other and there’s a very cozy feeling. But also means that everyone is in each other’s kishkes.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah. And the pain of betrayal when someone leaves that community, it’s hard not to take that personally. You left the community around eight years ago.

Izzy Posen:

Correct.

David Bashevkin:

Tell me a little bit about the initial… You left the community, you’re not a part of the Hasidic community that you grew up in. When you initially left, what was your relationship with the rest of the family?

Izzy Posen:

When I left I was 20 years old. I was essentially a teenager just out of yeshiva. The community and the family didn’t really know how to handle it. I think had I been in New York, I think there would’ve been trained people, experts who would get involved. I think in that community people didn’t know how to handle it, and as a result, I think mistakes were made on both sides. I can certainly talk about myself. I think the way I did it, I think I regret now and I think I would’ve done it very differently.

David Bashevkin:

What do you think some of the regrets or even mistakes that you think you made when leaving the community?

Izzy Posen:

I left with a bang. There was pictures flying around. I went on the BBC to talk about my educational experience as a child. I went to an illegal school. A very bad school, by the way. I’m not going to name it. It’s not about frum or not frum, it’s not even about a lack of education. We’re talking about a school where there was child abuse going on every single day, and I’m a victim of child abuse. So I went publicly and talked about it on the BBC.

Now, whether that was the right thing or wrong thing, I don’t know. Because I think that is a school that should be shut down. But regardless, the way I did it with a bang, I think there wasn’t enough thought about how it would impact my family. But on the other hand, the message from my family was very clear: “You’re not religious anymore, you’re out. You’re cut off.” There was no discussion of, “Can we compromise? Is there a way of doing it whilst you respect the family’s feelings?” There was no discussions. It was very clear-cut. You’re either in or out, and you’re out.

David Bashevkin:

Would it be fair to say, and you see this all the time with social media discourse, that you radicalized one another? That going out with a bang… Or whoever shot first was a great debate in one of the Star Wars movies. Without having the videotape. But shots were fired and you end up radicalizing one another. And the distance, there’s this negative feedback loop where you become even more distant than necessary.

Izzy Posen:

I think when dialogue comes to an end, when dialogue breaks down, you end up doing things that don’t take each other’s feelings into account. I think dialogue is very, very important and you have to have the right people on both sides to be able to advise and say, “Okay, this is a crisis.” It’s a crisis anyway, no matter how you do it. Leaving such a close-knit community is a crisis. It’s a crisis for the one who leaves, it’s a crisis for the people left behind, for the family. I think at that point you need people involved who go beyond. There’s the first stage of trying to save you, the kiruv stage, right?

David Bashevkin:

Yeah.

Izzy Posen:

We’re going to try and keep you frum. But even when that breaks down, you still need to keep the dialogue open. Okay, what happens now? What are the boundaries, the family boundaries? Your private life. You’ve decided not to be frum. That’s one thing. But what about the family? How are you going to respect the family’s boundaries? How can we keep that relationship alive? Sadly that didn’t take place in my case. And I hope that with time, with learning, with experience, I hope the community learns from that and I hope now there’s the right people who can advise parents in that very difficult situation.

David Bashevkin:

And you’ve also learned quite a bit and I want to talk and really focus on the role of your mother, aleha ha-shalom. Your mother passed away fairly recently and you’ve been sharing some pictures that you had with your mother. It seems that there was a reconciliation between you and your mother in a very real way, in almost the sweetest way in the whole world. Can you tell me a little bit about how that reconciliation came about with your mother? And then I’d like to discuss a little bit about your mother’s efforts about creating a reconciliation with your larger family.

Izzy Posen:

Yeah, of course. As you mentioned, sadly my mother passed away in tragic circumstances. It’s just over a month now, so it’s still very, very raw and very fresh. And I am talking to you with understanding that this is what my mother would’ve wanted. She was very passionate about keeping families together.

David Bashevkin:

Do you mind saying her name?

Izzy Posen:

Of course. Miriam Posen.

David Bashevkin:

Okay.

Izzy Posen:

You talked about reconciliation. So the relationship between me and my mother never really broke down. My mother never cut me off personally. We always talked. It was more about the wider family and the siblings. I’m the oldest of 10. There was a worry about me influencing the other siblings. Now, I’m not going to judge my mother’s concerns and my mother’s decisions. I know that she always acted out of love and she also followed the advice that was given to her, as painful as the decisions were.

What’s happened in recent years is we reopened the question of to what extent can we set boundaries and within those boundaries I can be a part of the family. As I said, in the earlier years I was more noisy so to speak, more outspoken, adversarial. And in those circumstances I guess the way it was seen is that I can’t possibly have a relationship with my siblings. It’s too dangerous. And in recent years I really tried to show my parents that actually I can. Regardless of my own religious views and my own religious practice, I can be sensitive to the family’s position that children are being brought up.

David Bashevkin:

How did you demonstrate that you had changed and that you had learned? Both sides need to learn when there’s estrangement. How did you demonstrate and project that Izzy, I’ve changed?

Izzy Posen:

Yeah, it was a long journey. Firstly, I was much more careful with what I said in public and how I presented in public, and people that have followed my journey over the years probably noticed that. And by the way, this is something I’ve always done. Always, whenever I met my parents I’d put on a koppel–

David Bashevkin:

A yarmulke.

Izzy Posen:

Yeah. I tried to show that I can respect that they have a way of life and I have a way of life and their sensitivities around that and we can respect it and put up boundaries. I think also, and this is quite a personal topic, but I think it’s important to talk about, there’s a question of honesty as well. I’m a very honest person. I’ve always been brought up very honest, and I think that sometimes stood against me. Because I felt, when I changed my views, when I changed my way of life, I had to be honest about it. There’s knowledge and wisdom, right? Knowledge you can learn from books, wisdom you learn from life. I think with life I learned a bit of wisdom, that honesty is a very good thing, but it has to be balanced against other things.

And I learned with my mother. My mother was a very special, lovely woman. Very tolerant, but also she was brought up a certain way and it was incredibly painful for her that I wasn’t frum. And in the early years I was very honest with her when I wasn’t frum. And I learned you really want to be honest with a loved one. You’re very close with a loved one. You feel that’s a relationship. How can I build a relationship that isn’t based on honesty? But sometimes you learn, actually I’m hurting them when I’m telling them everything I get up to. Actually they don’t want to know, they don’t have to know, and you balance that with other things. I think it’s something that I’ve learned over the years, and it’s an ongoing thing I have to say. It’s an ongoing thing.

I think we’re dealing with a very complex situation. We’re dealing with worlds colliding. It’s a clashing of worlds. You’re talking about a very, very conservative frum world. My family isn’t Modern Orthodox or Liberal Orthodox. They’re very, very conservative Hasidic, and then me, who isn’t Orthodox. And it’s a wider question of how do you maintain relationships when these worlds collide? And I think it takes a lot of wisdom, it takes a lot of advice, it takes a lot of learning from mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes on the way.

Yeah, so going back to my journey with my mother, I think we both learned on the way. I learned that balance, and I think she also started listening to other kind of mechanicim.

David Bashevkin:

The word mechanic is the Hebrew word for educator. Many of our listeners are familiar with. I just want to make sure .You’re an expert. I want to give a quick plug. You give physics classes on YouTube in Yiddish, so you’re familiar in many languages. Just want to make sure that our listeners all understand. So she was close with a lot of educators who gave her a little bit more of conservative guidance of how to relate with you.

Izzy Posen:

Right. And over the years I think that has changed. I think it’s not just she, it’s the community as a whole in Stamford Hill has changed. For example, when I was growing up in Stamford Hill, that whole idea of therapy or mental health was completely not on the books. Every mental health problem was interpreted as yetzer hara vs. yetzer tov. Evil inclination fighting the good inclination. If you struggle with depression, well it’s just because you’re not b’simchaenough in avoidas Hashem. Right?

David Bashevkin:

Sure.

Izzy Posen:

It’s just your test.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah.

Izzy Posen:

A lot of things have changed over the years, and one of the things that have changed is there’s an organization called Kesher Nafshi, an amazing organization. I think they originate in York.

David Bashevkin:

We are close friends. 18Forty has no official relationship with Kesher Nafshi, but we have spoken about Kesher Nafshi in the past, because family reconciliation, at least in my eyes, is a core part of everything that we do. Gedalia, who started Kesher Nafshi, is an amazing, amazing person, and I’ve been to their Shabbatonim, which are I wouldn’t say exclusively, but it’s mostly Hasidic or very Yeshivish homes, and people really stretching themselves. It is a holy place. I think the Kodesh HaKadashim organizationally is an organization that is dedicated to bringing families together. So your mother found this organization Kesher Nafshi. And she didn’t just go to a Shabbaton, she did much more than that.

Izzy Posen:

Yeah. She was involved in organizing basically a Kesher Nafshi branch in Stamford hill. She got together with parents who have children in similar situations, and she started talking to the parents and encouraging them, and on that journey our relationship also changed. And I talk with great sadness, because she’s no longer here, but over recent months we have really been growing closer and closer. Just three months ago we went away for a night away, my parents and I, for the first time since I left the community. My mother wanted us to spend more time together, to talk, to get closer, and that to be a step in the journey of coming back to my family. We had an amazing night together.

And I look back now, I didn’t know it at the time… Even at the time it wasn’t an amazing night, but now I look back and that’s the only time in the last eight years where I spent a night with my mother and I’m never going to have that again. But I look back, at least we had that. We talked very openly. I listened to their pain and they listen to my pain. I think it’s very important in this journey to acknowledge that you’ve made mistakes and to apologize for the mistakes. And saying that you’ve made mistakes doesn’t mean that you admit that you’re the guilty party. It’s not that way. Every side makes mistakes and that’s part of growth, to admit it, to apologize.

David Bashevkin:

The act of teshuvah is bilateral and both parties, you need to turn to one another, face one another. I couldn’t agree with that more. Tell me about the last time that you got a chance to see your mother.

Izzy Posen:

My mother always, especially in recent months as we’ve grown closer, she never missed an opportunity to meet up with me. We don’t live in the same areas, but I sometimes work in Stamford Hill and she’d say, “Every time you come to Stamford Hill for work, we have to meet up for lunch.” And she always cooked me some food and brought a salad always prepared with so much love. And we’d meet up and we’d sit together. And that last time, this was just… It was Erev Tisha B’Av. It was four or five days before her petirah. We sat together and she asked me before coming that I should bring pictures of what I look like, because she wants to show it to my siblings to prepare them for meeting me. Because obviously they don’t know what I look like now, I look different, and she wanted to prepare them. “This is what he looks like. We’re going to meet him.”

And I gave her those pictures and we had a lovely time, we said goodbye, and that’s it. And the next time I heard of her was when I heard the news, the sad news. She didn’t manage to show those pictures to my siblings and I ended up meeting my siblings for the first time in eight years at the coffin at the levaya. I met them there. You can’t describe the feeling of pain and sadness and all kinds of emotions involved in that.

David Bashevkin:

Were you able to have a moment of reconciliation, of almost reflecting that we’re not together, but we’re here in the same room and Mommy’s here. Were there unspoken feelings? Were you able to give siblings a hug? Were they able to acknowledge that you were there?

Izzy Posen:

With young kids not having seen a brother for eight years, it was a very sensitive moment, especially in the midst of such a loss. We discussed it very carefully with educators. And you can imagine that the whole day of my mother’s funeral, you can imagine what goes through your head in that day. But I spent that whole day on the phone with educators asking what’s the right thing to do. I’m going to meet my siblings for the first time in eight years. How do I do it? And the advice was, “Don’t make it about meeting up. This is about your mother’s funeral. There’s no hugging, there’s no…” We just met and it was very formal. But I did have that moment in the cemetery. It was more intimate. It wasn’t for the whole community, it was just close family members. And I spoke to my mother. Well, spoke isn’t even the right word. I tried to speak. I just burst out crying. I couldn’t even come to words. I was just crying away. And it wasn’t just crying over my mother’s death, it was crying over the last eight years as well, and not having been able to have more time with her before she went.

But I do feel I spoke to her and I have the feeling… I often imagine… There’s a phrase, I think it’s from the poets Keats, an English poet, where has a phrase, “Suspension of disbelief.” Sometimes you want to suspend your disbelief. And I sometimes envision my mother looking down on me and she says, “Well, I’m now in Olam HaEmes. I’m in the world of truth. I now understand.” And in that I find reconciliation. She understands that I never wanted to hurt her, that I never wanted to cause a pain. She understands there was pain and it was this very tragic clash of worlds, but it was never intentional. And I imagine her smiling at me. I imagine her smiling at me and just radiating love.

David Bashevkin:

I have no doubt that her merit, her legacy, her memory, is going to continue to pay dividends in your life and be a source of bracha and reconciliation. The story is not over. I was wondering, you wrote a poem after your mother passed called The Family Reunion. I was extraordinarily moved by it, because every family goes through pain and difficulty, and we always say, “Okay, we’ll figure it out at the next family simcha, the next thing.” And the next year goes by and before you know it there’s a real distance. You experienced this in a very real way. We have this notion that chazal, in rabbinic literature, it says, You should return to teshuvah one day before death, because you never know when you’re going to pass. So really your entire life is spent in reconciliation and with teshuvah. And you wrote a poem that I think highlights this in a familial sense. I read it also in a religious sense of our relationship with the divine. And I was wondering if you could read that poem?

Izzy Posen:

Yeah, sure. It’s called The Family Reunion. It could have been at a picnic in the park. It was at the funeral. It could have been at a festive family dinner. It was in the house of mourning. It could have been at a family celebration. It was in the cemetery. It could have been with her at our head. It was at her coffin. It could have been sooner. It was too late.

David Bashevkin:

It is a very haunting and moving poem, but I think if there’s any message from this story, and you could correct me if I’m wrong, is that it’s not entirely too late and that their story is still unfolding and that the trajectory and the effort that your mother made… Families have long traditions, especially from close-knit community. It’s not a little rowboat, it’s like a cruiser of different generations from the past. And to steer a cruise line ship doesn’t happen in one day, doesn’t happen in one week or one month. But it sounds like your mother made incredible efforts to begin tilting the ship of her life and your life and your family’s life and you as an individual, to move towards each other and that you don’t have to give up on this reconciliation. This is something that’s still unfolding and that we should be able to live and see in your lifetime and in our lifetime.

Izzy Posen:

I agree with you. I think of it as her having paved the way, and I’m sure it will happen. I haven’t finished working on that, making that happen. There’s still work to do, but she has laid the groundwork. And not only for me. The organization that she founded in London, the families that she brought together, I’m sure they’ll take this, they’ll take the work she did in her lifetime, they’ll take her death and they’ll learn from that and they’ll take her inspiration to wherever it takes. Keep families together. Not tomorrow, today. Tomorrow might be too late.

David Bashevkin:

Izzy Posen, I cannot thank you enough for sharing your story, sharing your words, and just being a shining light of thoughtful reflection, sophistication and nuance for the community that you’re a part of, the communities that you’re no longer a part of. I really think that you are a light of positivity. And even when there are very real differences, you navigate those differences with such thoughtfulness and grace. I’ve really learned a tremendous amount from you, and I have no doubt that the merit, the legacy of your mother is going to continue and lives on within you. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Izzy Posen:

Thank you, and thank you for allowing me to tell my story.

David Bashevkin:

I think the most iconic familial estrangement, though it wasn’t the same way that we’ve been talking about today is the biblical story of Yosef and his father Yaakov, where Yosef is fighting with his brothers and is ultimately sold into slavery and is estranged from his father, hidden from his father for decades. There is a very moving moment where they finally come back together, and the Torah tells us something very unusual and really remarkable. In that moment when they finally come back together, the pasuk says, this is the 46th chapter of Sefer Bereishit, the 29th verse. And the way that they came together, it says that Yosef gets off from his ride and he goes to greet his father and he sees him, and Yosef falls on his father’s shoulder, on his neck, and begins to cry, and he cries even more.

There is something extraordinarily remarkable in the story that really all of the commentaries point out, which is it seems in the story that it is only Yossef who is crying. Why is Yaakov not crying in this moment of reconciliation, in this familial moment? You have a father and a son that are finally back together, falling down on their shoulders, and only the son is crying. What’s Yaakov doing? Rashi says something very strange to explain what was Yaakov doing. Why wasn’t he crying? Rashi on the spot says that Yaakov in this moment, when he finally meets his son after so many years, is saying Kriyas Shema. Shema Yisroel, Hashem Elokeinu. Hashem Echad. He’s saying that prayer that we tuck in our children with, that we say twice a day. He used this moment to say Shema. And it is bizarre and the commentaries on Rashi all note how bizarre that is. Like, “What? You didn’t say Shema in the morning? Couldn’t have said it any other time? Why at this moment did you say Shema?”

And there are many suggestions for why exactly in this moment did he say Shema. The Maharal, in his commentary on Rashi, Gur Aryeh, says something. The Sfas Emes has some very beautiful ideas building on the Maharal. I’d like to suggest, and maybe there are others who said this too, that the reason why he used this moment to say Shema is that what Shema is all about is what is known as Yichud Hashem. It is the reconciliation of seeing divinity in all places in the world. And so long as this family was estranged, so long as he didn’t know where his son was, so long as there was this distance between father and son within a family, you weren’t able to say Shema in the same way that once a family comes together. Because part of our ability to have that Yichud Hashem, that unification of God and godliness in this world, is our ability to have reconciliation and see that divinity and godliness within our own families.

And in this moment, when Yaakov is finally reconciled and comes together with his son Yossef, he takes this moment and says, “I could finally say Kriyas Shema. I could finally be able to say, Shema Yisroel, Hashem Elokeinu. Hashem Echad. Lord, you are one.” To be able to see that oneness and have that oneness in your life is something that we can’t do fully so long as we are estranged from our parents on earth, from our siblings, from our family, from those who are closest to us. When you have that rupture, when you have that distance, we can say Shema, but not in the same way. And that there is a special Shema that we specifically say after reconciliation, after we really are able to achieve that unity in our life.

And I think we see this and perform this every year on Yom Kippur where the climax of all of Yom Kippur… We go through Elul, we go through Rosh Hashanah, we go through the 10 days of repentance. Finally we go through all the davening on Yom Kippur. And in those final moments of Neilah, what do we do? We finally say, Shema Yisroel,Hashem Elokeinu. Hashem Echad. In the closing moments of Yom Kippur, we almost reenact this story of Yaakov and Yosef, of this reconciliation, and say, “Finally I’ve made amends with everybody. Now I can finally say Kriyas Shemawith my entire heart and soul.” That I’ve done the work, I’ve made amends, I’ve done to best to my ability and capacity to seek forgiveness, achieve forgiveness, and find that oneness between me and my family, between me and other Jews, between me and my friends, between me and my siblings. Now I can finally say fully and completely Shema Yisroel, Hashem Elokeinu. Hashem Echad. There’s oneness in my life. Baruch Shem Kevod Malchuso L’olam Va’ed.

And these are the verses that we end, so to speak, all of Yom Kippur with. We scream at the top of our lungs in those closing moments of Neilah, like Yosef finally being reconciled with his father, like Yaakov in that moment of finally embracing his son Yosef, who he didn’t know where he was for decades. Finally we have a reconciliation in our life in those closing moments of Yom Kippur. And what do we do? We say Shema. Finally we’re together and we can approach together. Each family, each friend can approach together, echad, as one.

There is an incredible blog post that Izzy wrote. And I want to read it, because it’s so beautiful and it’s so moving. It’s a post that he wrote to his mother following her death and processing the pain and everything that was unmet. And I want to read to you this post he wrote after his mother’s passing. “Mommy,” he writes, “I’m sad.” It’s very sad. It’s okay to feel sad. And these are the responses that he imagines his mother writing. “Mommy, I miss you so much.” “I miss you too, Shefaleh. You made me a mother. I learned a lot from you.” “I didn’t make it easy for you,” Izzy writes. And he imagines his mother responding, “No, you didn’t. That never made me stop loving you.” “Mommy, I’ve been missing you for eight long years and you promised me that we’ll all be together very soon. Why have you left me now?” No response. “Mommy?” “I’m listening,” she responds. “Mommy, I felt so much pain over the years.” “I know,” she responds. “So have we.”

“Are you proud of me?” He asks his mother.” “We were always proud of you. We always saw what a mensch you are and your good middos.” “That’s on you, Mommy. You didn’t give us another option.” “Well you didn’t adhere to the other things that I taught you.” “No, I didn’t,” he admits. “And you never accepted that.” “How could I? You went against everything we stood for.” And he says, “I always tried to do what I believe was right. I was following the truth like you taught me.” “I can see that now. I’m in the Olam HaEmes, the world of truth.”

“But mommy,” he asks, “You know I don’t believe.” “Yes, but I did and you’re talking to me.” “Mommy, I don’t want to let go of you.” “You don’t have to,” he writes. “You can always talk to me.” “Mommy, I loved you so much and I needed your love so much.” And she responds, “I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise, but I’m going to make sure it happens now.” “But you won’t be there with us and that’s very painful.” “Yes, it’s very painful.” “Mommy?” “Yes?” “I’m going to carry on. I’m going to make the best of life.” “Of course you are. I’m not giving you another option. Don’t forget your gym, and eat healthy.”

“Mommy?” “Yes?” “Will you sing for me? I’m feeling sleepy.” “Aren’t you a little too old for that,” his mother asks. “Weren’t you a little too young for what you did?” “You’re right.” And his mother finishes in this imagined conversation that’s so beautiful, a reconciliation. She says, “Let’s sing it to each other.” And being able to sing with each other even with pain, even with a little bit of rupture, even with things not fully resolved, but even to imagine, with those relationships that we hold most dear, that we could at least move towards a reconciliation. And never, God forbid, to wait too long for one. That we shouldn’t have to imagine it. We should be able to see it and experience it in our lifetime together. To be able to sing together, to uplift one another, to comfort and heal together.

Because all of us carry wounds, all of us have baggage. We shouldn’t wait so long that we have to imagine these conversations. But they should be conversations that are able to take place within our lifetimes, within each other, with our friends, with our family, with our parents, with our siblings. That we should be able to come together as one before the high holidays.

Before I do the final closing, and I know this has been a long episode, but I really do feel a measure of obligation to publicly ask for your mechilah. Thank God we’re on our third year. We have grown exponentially, and I’m so grateful to our listeners and our community. And as we grow, there’s a closeness that I really feel to everybody who tunes in and listens and shares. It means the world to me and it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. But that closeness also allows for disappointment, for betrayal, for people thinking that I spoke about issues that I shouldn’t have spoken about, or spoke about issues that I should have spoken about in a different way. People who have reached out, sought for help or counseling or time and I wasn’t able to make time available as quick as they wanted, as long as they wanted. I want to be there for everybody.

And I know that part of the privilege of having a platform and having a community is that you’re going to disappoint, there are going to going to be unmet expectations, and there may even be feelings of betrayal, that you really let us down in a very real way. And I feel it’s necessary in the most honest way possible. I don’t know everybody who listens and I can’t reach out individually. And I know there are a lot of emails and WhatsApp messages that have fell between the cracks. And every single one, it’s never intentional, it’s never deliberate. I remember we disappointed somebody after one of the episodes and I begged. Give me somebody’s email. I want to ask for forgiveness from everybody. I don’t want people to feel ever like they’re sitting with disappointment or frustration, or God forbid, that 18Forty or our relationship took you in a direction that was anything less than positive, anything less than uplifting.

I do feel, in the most honest and sincere way, as a community to come together and ask mechilah. I hope that I have your forgiveness and I have your mechilah. As we enter collectively into Yom Kippur, the Yemei HaDin, I hope we enter it as one, and with that oneness of Shema Yisroel, with that oneness of connecting and feeling whole with one another. And from the absolute bottom of my heart, I’d like to wish each and every one of our listeners a Gmar Chasima Tova, that we should all be inscribed in the Book of Life and should have lives of joy, of sweetness, of nachas, of inspiration, of only good things. And it should be a year of wonderment and joy and curiosity for all of us and all those we love.

There is a beautiful song that I began listening to with my children in the car. It’s a sad song, but I asked permission from the composer, Eli Gerstner. The song is called Daddy Come Home. I asked him why he wrote it. It’s a song about a father going out to war and being separated from his family. I didn’t think that the composer ever fought in the army and I asked him, “Why did you write it?” He said, “I wrote this song because I had to travel a lot away from my own family. And every time that I traveled, it was always very painful and very sad.” And I traveled quite a bit visiting different communities, and it’s always hard. And it’s a beautiful song called “Daddy Come Home.” I used to sing with my son Zevi when it used to be very, very hard for him when I would leave. Now it’s a little bit easier, because we bribe him with Legos. But it used to be very, very hard. It’s still hard.

We used to sing together, “Daddy always comes back. Daddy always comes back.” And we started listening to this song, which is much more heartfelt and much more beautiful, about a child’s plea for their father to come home. And I want to leave this episode with his most beautiful song, which is all about familial reconciliation, familial longing, and that ultimately each of us should have the ultimate reconciliation with Avinu Shebashamayim. That our families and our loved ones should all be home together. Wishing you all a Gmar Chasima Tova.

So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our dearest friend Denah Emerson. Thank you so much for all of your incredible work and support on the 18Forty team this past year. And thank you so much to our series sponsors, Daniel and Mira Stokar. Your friendship, support, kindness means the absolute world to me. And thank you once again to our episode sponsor, Leah Younger. Dr. Younger and her psychology practice does such incredible work uplifting people who are in times of difficulty, in times of need. I am so grateful for your support, your friendship, and your guidance, especially for this very episode. It is a tribute to everything that you do and your work. I cannot thank you enough for your support.

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