Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Navigating Estrangement During the Holiday Season with Gina Moffa
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 496 of Live Happy Now. As we move into the holiday season, we hear a lot about how it’s a time for gathering with family and other loved ones. But what do you do when that’s not the case?
I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week I’m talking with Gina Moffa, a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in grief and loss, trauma, and painful life transitions. She’s here today to talk about estrangement and how it can affect us, especially during the holiday season. Gina explains what leads to estrangement, why the incidents of estrangement are growing, and offer self-care practices to help navigate the holidays and beyond. Let’s have a listen.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:45] PF: Gina, welcome back to Live Happy Now.
[0:00:47] GM: Hi, Paula. I’m so happy to be here with you. It’s like, at least my yearly reunion with you. I love it.
[0:00:53] PF: I know. It’s like our holiday conversation. It’s like what deep topic can we get into during the most festive time of the year?
[0:01:00] GM: I know.
[0:01:02] PF: We were speaking about grief last year, and it led up the air to talk about estrangement, and it’s something that’s been in my mind since then. I guess to start, let’s talk about really what we mean by estrangement, because I’ve had people say like, “Oh, I’m estranged from my family, too.” It’s like, really, they just had a fight over a sweater or something, so it’s not the same. Tell us what we mean by estrangement.
[0:01:24] GM: Estrangement is a type of severing. I mean, it is a loss, a severing of relationships, and let’s be honest, when we estrangement from people, it’s usually a last-ditch effort to maintain our sense of safety or emotional stability. It’s like a last-ditch effort to put an end to something that is an emotionally untenable situation with someone in our lives. Most of the time, it’s not just a fight that doesn’t come from a fight that’s recent. It’s usually incredibly historical, and a lot of disagreements, or a lot of patterning of abuse, or neglect, or just really hard relationship patterns. It’s more than just disagreements in a family or any kind of relationship.
[0:02:10] PF: I think that’s a really good point to make is that estrangement isn’t a decision that’s made hastily or taken lightly.
[0:02:19] GM: Absolutely.
[0:02:19] PF: As you said, there’s been attempts. There have been all kinds of methods of trying to make this work. Separating going back. What are some of the reasons that you see in your practice that really drive estrangement amongst families?
[0:02:34] GM: A lot of the people that I work with, they’re dealing with kind of, some kind of treatment that involves marginalizing or ignoring, hyper-criticizing, scapegoating. Any kind of other abusive behavior, whether it’s verbal abuse that just gets to be too much and starts compounding. Obviously, more recently in the last eight years or 12 years, actually. I could say there’s been a lot of political divide. So, there’s been a lot of the idea that we actually have very moral differences between us, and they are not going to be something that we can work through or talk through. That’s usually more through siblings, I’m seeing in my practice, but it has been a lot through parental and child relationships, too.
[0:03:20] PF: The election isn’t really the cause of it. It’s like that final straw. Is that what you’re seeing?
[0:03:27] GM: I am. You know, it’s more that people are starting to say, okay, we know what people’s priorities are, but now that I see that you don’t actually respect me or care about my well-being, it is actually reminding me of all of the times in my life before that you didn’t care about my well-being according to me, right? This is always – our own sense of it all. If you didn’t feel like you were respected or that your opinion mattered or that your well-being was prioritized, and then an election comes up and your parent or your sibling or your family member votes against your well-being potentially, it’s going to not just be this one-time event. It’s going to be something that mirrors back to a pattern of behavior and that relationship that then re-traumatizes you.
It’s a little bit like being on a hamster wheel, because you try different ways of getting through to somebody, and then you realize that you just can’t. Together, the relationship keeps coming to an impasse, and that’s usually something that takes a lot of time. I don’t know anyone in my practice who is currently estranged from a family member who did something very quickly, or who didn’t first try very, very hard to fix the relationship or heal something within the relationship.
So, like I said earlier, it’s really a last-ditch effort, but within that effort there’s a lot of pain, and grief, and trauma, and really wanting to fix and heal that. We’re humans, we thrive on connection. So, to think of just disconnecting in that good vibes-only thing, it’s not actually what people want, and it’s not actually what people tend towards first.
[0:05:07] PF: Yeah. What’s interesting is that I’ve seen a lot of articles about how it is on the rise. What is it that is driving more people to be able to take that step and say, “I need to be estranged to protect my own mental health and for my own safety?” Because it used to be like my parents’ generation, you just put up with that. You didn’t really separate. That was very uncommon, but it is becoming, especially I’ve seen a lot about Gen Z is distancing. Can you speak about like what might be making that difference?
[0:05:42] GM: I think that before there was a lot of shame in it, and people didn’t speak about it because the idea that you would sever from your family member would mean there’s something wrong with you. I think that with social media, maybe specifically TikTok, let’s say if we’re talking about the younger generation. There’s so much more openness and vulnerability, their private life. TikTok is known as the social media venue that bears it all.
I think on the plus side of that, more people are talking about their pain, more people are talking and showcasing family relationships. Its like people don’t want to hide their pain away anymore. I read a research study recently that said that estrangement is now as prevalent as divorce. It was a 2016 study, I believe. So, it’s more people are reporting it. I think there is just so much less shame in the divide.
[0:06:39] PF: That’s incredible. Let’s talk about what that means as we go into the holidays, because obviously, we are surrounded by the messaging that, oh, it’s a time for family, our loved ones. We all gather together, and that’s not happening.
[0:06:53] GM: No.
[0:06:53] PF: If someone is in that position and they are estranged from their families, or if you’re the family that we have to understand, even the family also grieves that loss. There are parents who don’t have that son or daughter at the Christmas table. So, on both sides, what do we do for our mental health during the holiday season?
[0:07:15] GM: Well, it’s so funny, because two years ago when you and I first started doing these holiday podcasts together.
[0:07:22] PF: A holiday chat.
[0:07:22] GM: I remember saying – yeah, our holiday conversations, which I love. I remember telling you that one of the things that is so apparent is that when we get to the holiday season, whether or not you’re in a period of estrangement or grief through death loss or any other type of loss, it really feels as though everything you don’t have is illuminated. So, it is just that trigger moment where you realize, I’m in a state of grief, no matter what that is, or what type of loss it is.
When it comes to estrangement, the severed relationships are really much, much harder, because you’re imagining what the people are going to be doing. It’s like this disenfranchised grief because people don’t know, right? Let’s talk about the idea that the outside world may not know that you’re in this estranged period of your life with people. So, they don’t know that you’re grieving. So, you’re hurting and they don’t know to recognize it. They don’t know how to help or support.
Maybe they don’t see the disenfranchised grief of estrangement as being something that’s worthy of being grieved, right? Because why can’t you just fix it? That is on both sides, right? I think there would be a real desire for healing if people could. If people could do it. But estrangement is even as prevalent as it is, is not the type of loss and grief that society really thinks is legitimate. So, it really makes it a very lonely experience and even more so during the holidays.
[0:08:51] PF: How can someone reach out and get the comfort that they need to make it through the holiday season and not just feel lonely and grieving and alone?
[0:09:04] GM: My hope is that somebody will have a support system, will have a community of friends at the very least that they can create new family relationships with. You hear it all the time family is not just blood. So many people who are estranged, but also people who live in different parts of the country or different parts of the world do wind up making kins of makeshift families, especially around the holidays.
I think that this is a time where there can also be a need for extra support. So, this is a time I would say, maybe it isn’t your best interest to reach out to a therapist or a support group during the holidays. There certainly is no shortage of them for the holidays, so that you could feel a little bit less isolated, because one of the main things about grief is it’s an incredibly isolating experience no matter what your loss is.
If you’re dealing with a loss that society or others may not see as so important or the same importance as a death loss, you’re going to feel even lonelier. So, for me, it’s like, this is your self-care time that is going to be for survival. It’s going to be how can I gather the resources around me? How can I utilize my friends and ask my friends for more support during this time? How can I be bold enough to ask myself to ask to be included in things? How can I feel a little bit less isolated?
I think it is a really tricky thing for people, because we do tend to go inward when we’re feeling isolated. We tend to do it more. I’m going to ask people to go against what they would normally feel like they would want to do and use the season to reach out more and to acknowledge your feelings. I think we’re so conditioned to stay quiet about the way that we feel, because people will judge it. Yet I just feel like this is too important. The grief, and the depression, and anxiety that can come with that can feel so disorienting and overwhelming. This is not a time to be brave.
[0:11:10] PF: Right. Because I remember my twenties just trying to the whole thing was once that holiday season hit. It’s like just get through it. I would work a lot. I worked in a newspaper then and I was always like I’ll work Thanksgiving. I’m the one like, I will work Christmas. I will work Christmas Eve. I would take all that. I would do it under the guise of, “Hey, you all have families. You can be with them.” I hid the real reason I was doing that and made it look like, “Oh, look, no, you guys, I’m good. You go do your family thing. I don’t need it.” I think that was – I just remember that being the only way that I could get through it, so I just pushed through it. Then once it was done, you’re just this big exhale and people shouldn’t have to go through six weeks of a year like that.
[0:11:52] GM: Yeah. It’s this anticipatory anxiety and grief too. But it’s funny you say that, because it reminds me of a client was working with long ago who would come in and have so many feelings about this estrangement journey. I remember asking what peace would look like. Her response was peace would feel like feeling nothing. Having no feelings about this whatsoever. Getting to a place where I have no feelings about it whatsoever as supposed to pain.
I think that probably anybody who’s listening might feel similar to that in some capacity, like I would – just the way you said. I got through it. I felt nothing in a way. We got through it and it was over, right? That is the idea, which is that the only two feelings to have are this despair, anger, cluster, helplessness, cluster and nothing.
[0:12:50] PF: Right.
[0:12:51] GM: That’s hard.
[0:12:52] PF: It is.
[0:12:53] GM: That’s a really unique feeling and experience within a estrangement that I’ve seen.
[0:12:58] PF: Are there any practices that you recommend to clients, like journaling or anything like that, that can help alleviate some of what they’re going through and make them feel less lonely? Obviously, it’s good for them to be able to reach out, make connections, connect with other people, create your own new traditions, find your own tribe. But what practices can they do in those quiet moments when it is just them and they need to alleviate some of that pain and that grief?
[0:13:26] GM: Yeah. One of the things I really tend towards is letter writing. You know, no, sends letter writing. I have – sometimes you can get in trouble when you send them. But you know the idea, I have some clients who will have a notebook where it’s really just dedicated to writing letters to the person. It’s an evidence-based practice that journaling itself is incredibly therapeutic. We know that. But continuing to get that out of your body. It’s a real important somatic practice as well.
I don’t mean just typing it out, but I mean physically handwriting if you’re able to, because getting out all of the things that come up, whether it’s the anger, and the rage, and the helplessness, and the hopelessness, and the grief, you know. Estrangement is a living loss and it’s going to change and your feelings will change about it. We may feel longing, and yearning, and missing. Then we may feel that rage again. We may feel the sadness and the hopelessness that things would ever change.
I think it’s one of the more difficult things, because we are living through it and there is in the back of our mind a small, small possibility that things could change, because it’s not too late. So, when we’re in a living loss like that we’re grieving so many different things that come up, whether it’s just the relationship itself or shared history, and the memories, and all of these things. We have so many secondary losses and ripple effects of that.
Getting that all out of your body and being able to have a safe place and that is the most important thing is finding a safe place in every moment, but at least having it in this notebook form that I will go to this notebook. I will bring it with me wherever I go. If something is reawakened in me and I have a really intense feeling, I’m just going to get it out of my body onto this paper. I may want to say a lot of things to this person. That may or may not be unsavory or I may have so many really deep feelings that feel so shameful or hard that I’m holding on to, that I can get out on the page.
So, for me, the letter writing is one of the most healing experiences, though I will say that people don’t generally want to do it at first, because it seems silly. But once they get into it and realize they have a dedicated little notebook straight to that experience, people feel a lot of reliefs and a sense of feeling a little bit as if they’ve been able to process and metabolize a lot of the hard things, even if we don’t send it, there’s still a lot of power in making that letter specific to this person.
[0:16:00] PF: Yeah. I think people get surprised at how big of a release it offers.
[0:16:05] GM: Yeah.
[0:16:05] PF: Because if you say write a letter, it’s like, “What’s that going to do?” But it does so much. It really is incredible. I’m glad you brought up doing it pen to paper or pencil to paper, because that is shown to be so different than sitting and typing. What about just journaling as well and just writing out those feelings of this is where I’m at, kind of tracking how you are on your journey. Does that help?
[0:16:29] GM: Absolutely. I think that any time we can get our feelings out of our body in any capacity, whether that’s walking and talking to people. I’m a really big champion of movement and getting things out of our bodies too, but journaling is really, really powerful and really getting clear on what it is we feel and what our experience is in every moment. I think it can be hard, because so many people are moving so quickly and we can be so overwhelmed with all of the things happening around us that it can be really hard to know what we feel.
It can also be hard to feel like our emotions and experiences are valid, you know, when it comes to the holidays and estrangement. I’m a fan of journaling, writing, anything that you can get your feelings in a place where you can find clarity and release is probably one of the biggest most important healing modalities for sure.
[0:17:25] PF: That’s terrific. A lot of times during the holidays, I know this from experience, you might feel like, maybe this is the time to give it another shot. I’ve seen that go very badly.
[0:17:36] GM: Yeah. I have too.
[0:17:38] PF: Can you address that if someone feels that and we’re not telling them not to do that, because maybe it does work for some people, but what are kind of the guardrails they need to put in place and some of the things they need to consider before making that move?
[0:17:53] GM: I mean, I think that I would start with your why. Are you doing it just because you’re feeling lonely? Are you doing it because you feel guilty? Are you doing it because you want to make them feel guilty? I think it’s important to know what our reasoning is really honestly, not just to say, “I miss them. It’s the holidays. I want to reconnect.” Because there’s always a lot of wishful thinking behind it that the time and space will get somebody to come back and tell us exactly what we’ve always dreamed of hearing, but time and experience has shown us that we wouldn’t be estranged if it were that simple.
I would say please tune in with yourself and be really honest about a couple of things. Why you’re doing it, what you expect to get out of it, how you plan on being present, and loving, and gentle with yourself, if you don’t get the response that you’re looking for or any response at all. How to not take a step back in some way with your own healing? I just want people to be really honest about what their intentions are in this. It’s not to say, don’t do it. I think it can be a beautiful thing if it works out well and people can come together during the holidays, but if it’s something that will just be for the moment, I think it’s going to be more hurtful for the long term.
I had a client who was estranged from a sibling. The sibling said for the sake of our parent, you can come for Christmas. Then after that, we’ll go right back to not talking again. It was so confusing. It’s like, well, what do we do with that? Do you go?
[0:19:30] PF: We just like, everything’s fine.
[0:19:33] GM: Yeah. Are we in this Cold War for a moment and this – and I think that can be really confusing, and then what if it goes wrong? There’s more stress during the holiday than it would be if you made something more comforting for yourself. I think that we have to really be careful to not fall into a trap of wish full thinking and magical thinking that everything will be okay. That’s really just us being self-protective in that way.
[0:20:01] PF: I think it’s also important that they make sure they’ve got someone in their corner that phone, a friend thing going on that they can reach out to, whether it’s a therapist, they can reach out to, a friend that if they do choose to go that route and things go south to be able to get that help immediately to have somebody to talk to and who knows their situation and can put it in perspective for them.
[0:20:24] GM: Absolutely. Thank you for saying that. That’s a really big one. Because at the end of the day, it’s how do we not feel so alone and how do we feel safe? I think for me, and I talk about this in my book on Grief a lot, really the importance of feeling safe in our lives, and our bodies with the people that we have around us, because so many people have really unregulated nervous systems and live in the state of survival and fight, flight or freeze or fawn.
We don’t recognize it, because we’re so used to living in that way. But once we start to live in a safe place or find safety with another person, we start to see just how damaging it was for us to live in this place with these people and in these situations that were so hard on our nervous system and our body. It is really important to find a sense of safety with the people around you, so whoever that may be.
[0:21:22] PF: This is such incredible information. As we said, we wanted to have this conversation for a while. I knew it was going to be a good one. Before I let you go, how can the friends of someone who’s a estrange? How can they be helpful? One of the things that really saved my life. Shout out to my best friend, Marcy. We’ve been friends since we were –
[0:21:39] GM: Marcy.
[0:21:41] PF: Marcy. She always took me in. She has always been that part of my life. Everybody needs their Marcy. What can that person do if you have someone who is a estrange? What can we do for them?
[0:21:58] GM: I think that first and foremost, we have to not be in a place of thinking that it’s temporary for them. I think that we have to not give advice and not push or pull them in a direction that doesn’t feel safe or good for them, but to continue to validate their experience, because they are in this situation and this experienced with a separate relationship, because it was not tenable. If it were easy and they could take your advice or anyone else’s, we wouldn’t be in this position.
I think it’s really important to validate their experience, because they haven’t been validated the whole point. So, if we can do that and it’s a lot like we would do for a griever. You and I have talked a lot about tips for a griever, right? How do we not say, well, at least, or come to them with platitudes? How do we just create a safe place for somebody to be? Whether they want to talk to us or not, whether we want to offer advice or say, “Hey, do you want advice or would you me to just listen?” “Would you me to help you find solutions or would you me to just be here and sit with you?”
Asking those questions to somebody gives them so much agency over a situation in their life that they probably didn’t feel like they had any. So, helping them and to have that sense of empowerment again by asking them questions and giving them the opportunity to say what they need is going to be a really powerful thing to do with someone that you love. I think, you know the idea of it is really just to know that they’re going through a really complex loss situation. To be present, to be by their side, to not think that it’s going to be temporary, but to know that this could be a lifelong grief that they carry and that you remember dates and you remember to reach out and check in, don’t stop doing that. Don’t stop doing that. Be like Marcy.
[0:23:52] PF: We need a bumper sticker.
[0:23:54] GM: I was going to say. I have a question about Marcy. What did Marcy do that took you in?
[0:23:59] PF: She never judged. She never bashed my family, but would listen and would point out unhealthy parts about it. She also basically gave me her parents in lieu of mine, like they pretty much adopted me as part of that and to this day. So, just that, as you talked about, she was always supportive, never judgmental. She would sometimes ask questions that would make me think about like am I doing things differently? Should I be doing things differently? Is this healthy for me? Yeah, mostly she was there.
[0:24:39] GM: That’s it, right? We just need people to be present and to show up and to be them. That’s it really to create a safe place for us to just be whatever we need to be in the moment, whether that’s strong or overly emotional or nom and shut down, or just in need of hug and a stand in family. I think the stand in family, just kind of what you were saying is one of the things that we didn’t talk about, but I think is also really common with the younger generation is that people are stepping in and standing in.
There are really beautiful humans in the world doing good things to step in and stand in and know that connection is important. Connection is survival for so many of us and how we thrive. There are so many unique new things that we see around the country, around the world, actually, where people are able to say, “I know you’re going through something that’s really, really hard and difficult and painful. You shouldn’t have to do that alone. Let us stand up and stand in and be here with you.” That is something I’m starting to see more of. It’s really, really heartening and beautiful and healing, even just to see.
[0:25:54] PF: I love that. I love that. Gina, you have given us so much to think about as always. I just really appreciate you being able to talk about this so openly. Give us a roadmap for what we can do and how we can get through it. I’m going to tell the listeners how they can find your book, because it is about grief. As you have noted, this is a form of loss and grief, counseling, grief resolution is a huge part of it. Thank you so much for all you do.
[0:26:21] GM: Thanki you, Paula for all you do.
[0:26:23] PF: Let’s come up with something for next year, okay.
[0:26:25] GM: We must. I believe in us.
[0:26:29] PF: Yeah.
[0:26:30] GM: To you, I say these days, gentle holidays. Gentle holidays. Just be compassionate and gentle with oneself. That’s all we can do these days.
[0:26:39] PF: I love it.
[OUTRO]
[0:26:44] PF: That was therapist Gina Moffa, talking about estrangement. If you’d like to learn more about Gina, follow her on social media, or check out her book, Moving on Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss. Visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Live Happy Now. If you aren’t already receiving us every week, we invite you to follow us so you never miss an episode. We love to hear from you, so please drop us a review and let us know what you think of the show. That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one.
