Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hello everybody. Welcome back. We are in the Beyond the Sessions segment of the Securely Attached podcast, and we’re going to be answering your listener questions. I have Dr. Rebecca Hershberg here. Welcome. So good to you.

Dr. Rebecca (00:57):

Thank you. Thank you. Always like a total highlight of my week for sure.

Dr. Sarah (01:02):

I know, it’s so fun. We’re lucky we get to do this. I have a question that I am really glad that you’re here to answer because your take on this. I’m very interested in your opinion and advice you have to give. So I’m going to read this question that we got from a listener. So she writes, hello, I’d love to hear your advice on navigating my relationship with my mom. She is fully brainwashed by Fox News. We weren’t especially political growing up, but now that she is retired, she’s consuming this content all day long. And now anytime I talk to her, she parrots all the headlines to me. I am still close with my mom and dad, but as a liberal mom of three, I am finding myself avoiding bringing my children around her because of the things that she says and how damaging they are for my kids to hear.

(01:53):

And that’s completely heartbreaking. I feel like I’m grieving over this and trying to reconcile that this is the same woman that taught me all these amazing things and made me the person I am today in large part because of what she taught me, but she’s gone off the rails now. It has me rethinking how much I should integrate from her parenting with my own kids. I think it’s hard to articulate clearly, but I know for me it impacts me as a parent quite a lot and has had a major impact on my mental health. Do you have any advice for how I can handle and work through this? I have a feeling there are a lot of other parents in a similar situation as me. So heavy. It’s really heavy.

Dr. Rebecca (02:31):

I was about to say, I’m like, I feel so sorry for this listener. I will say that the way she wrote the question leads me to feel like she’s processing it, she’s thinking about it and working through it and using words like grief. And I think that’s important. When I hear this question, I hear a couple phrases jumped out at me that I think are just important to highlight. One is brainwashed, another is something about how she’s constantly parroting headlines. I think when we address this question, it’s important to recognize that of course there’s political undertones to the way that the question is written, and yet it’s almost written as though she feels like she’s lost her mom a little bit. And that could be to whatever beliefs our listeners. It could be to a political belief, it could be to a religious belief, it could be to. And so I know we have listeners who may pay attention to Fox News may have voted differently from the way I personally voted and I do not keep my politics quiet, but that’s not so much. This question to me isn’t so much about my parents and I disagree about a set of issues. It’s like I’ve lost my mom to this cult almost. How do I manage that with my kids? Do you read it similarly?

Dr. Sarah (04:06):

No, I do. And specifically things, some key words that she uses, but also the description of her mother’s behavior, right? She’s consuming this content all day long and anytime I interact with her or when she’s even in front of my children, her ability to filter any of this out to fit the context, read the room, read the audience, isn’t there. So that to me says that this has become something much larger than, oh, she’s got different political opinions than me. What do I do about it? It’s that it’s becoming intrusive, it’s taking over. It’s really interfering with sounds like her mother’s ability to stay connected to her. The woman who wrote the question and is now putting her in a position where she’s trying to figure out, like you said, grieve the loss of maybe the relationships she used to have with her mom, but also kind of navigate how this impacts her parenting. They don’t, unfortunately, how our relationship with our own parents works, how it’s going. The health of that relationship isn’t isolated from often our relationship with kids, our own kids because they’re their grandparents. We’re intergenerationally. We’re intergenerationally connected still. We can’t isolate these relationships from the family system.

Dr. Rebecca (05:34):

Yeah, no, and I think there’s the relationship coupled with, and we don’t know for this listener logistically, are these, were they seeing each other all the time? Also, are these grandparents that live in Florida that they’re FaceTiming with or are these grandparents that were doing babysitting all the time? There’s an important distinction there too, but I view this all through an attachment lens, right? This sounds like a real attachment injury. She’s saying, and I think it’s so important to bring this language here of this podcast. She’s saying, I thought my mom was this way. I felt so seen by her. I felt so understood by her. I felt like we were really connected. We were really tuned into each other and now this thing has happened and there’s a rupture and it’s left me feeling really lost and destabilized and I don’t feel seen. She says as a liberal mother of three, I don’t feel like she sees me.

(06:45):

I don’t feel like she gets me. And in some ways, the way it’s written is such a beautiful description in some ways of how it feels. Even as an adult when one of our attachment figures, our safe attachment, secure attachment figures shifts in such a way that feels really, really injurious and harmful. And I do think the first thing to do, and she’s doing it, is process. What is this like for me? Who am I now that this attachment relationship has shifted so much? Can I still find myself? Can I still find what my beliefs are internally, who I am internally, the kind of mom that I want to be? Can I hold onto that? Can I use that as my compass? It’s interesting. She says that it’s making her doubt or I forget how she framed it, but making her doubt whether she can integrate the way that her mom parented her with the way that she parents, her own children. In light of the fact that this has now happened, I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of that part of the question. Did you have any thoughts on that piece?

Dr. Sarah (08:07):

Well, I think it kind of illustrates what you were talking about, that I have this relationship with my mother and now that relationship feels unrecognizable. But how I was parented by my mom, I mean the way, at least the way she sort of paints the pictures, that the way that she originally was parented by her mom felt good and that she did have things that made her feel close and connected and seen by her mom. And that perhaps that it has previously informed her approach to parenting her own kids. And if that’s the case, hold onto that. Sometimes those things our parents can get as they get older, they might change their perceptions on things. Their skillset might also deteriorate for other reasons. You can hold on to parts of them that you have internalized that felt healthy to you and feel like something that you want to continue to reference when raising your kids.

(09:05):

I’m aware that could be painful. It can cause acute grief because if you are like, oh man, I had this great memory of how my mom handled this situation that I’m facing with my own kids in this moment, and I’m going to call upon that memory to inform the way I’m parenting in this moment. And just doing that might also bring to your conscious awareness how that’s not what your relationship with your mom is like now. And that contrast can be painful. So I guess my point is you can do both. You can conjure up the internalized parts of your mother that felt reinforcing to you and encouraging to you and that you want to use to guide your parenting. And you may grieve as you do it.

Dr. Rebecca (09:53):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (09:53):

But, they don’t have to be. You don’t have to throw it all away.

Dr. Rebecca (09:57):

It’s like there’s a saying in 12 step programs, take what you like and leave the rest. You can sort of pick and choose. And again, and the fact that this is what has happened to this woman now doesn’t change the way she was in the past. And I think you make a really telling point, Sarah, when you said that maybe their abilities changed if her mom had developed early dementia or Alzheimer’s. Is there a parallel there? And it sort of is because again, the language that the question is written with is sort of, I’ve lost my mom, the mom that I knew, the mom that I loved. And I think it’s more complicated because there’s a sense that with this kind of a thing, her mom is somehow doing it on purpose or could change it, but it’s that same feeling.

Dr. Sarah (10:52):

Or is making some choice versus you choose to get dementia.

Dr. Rebecca (10:59):

Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to lose that difference. That’s a really important difference. And yet when it comes to this idea of can I still use what I learned from her in the past in my own parenting or in my own character development or whatever, to me the answer is still a clear and resounding yes because that was all still, what’s happening now doesn’t have to change how valuable that was then. And it doesn’t add new meaning to it, I guess is what I’m saying. It’s like just because my mom has become this new person, does that mean that the person she was before is somehow less trustworthy or less valuable in what she had to offer? And to me, the is no, it’s okay to keep those things seperate.

Dr. Sarah (11:59):

And at the same time, this is particularly tricky because this mom isn’t gone or isn’t completely incapacitated. And we could talk a little bit about brainwashing. I actually think it’s not volitional. And there is a piece that I think should be said that when someone is truly brainwashed by content, and I do think that is something that is happening at way greater degrees of frequency nowadays with social media and just the constant algorithm load that we’re getting hit with all the time, that I don’t know that that is also not volitional. It’s a lot of you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s already happened. So it could be a quick and slippery slope.

Dr. Rebecca (12:53):

Right, that the distinction we were saying between something like Alzheimer’s and something like this isn’t necessarily as heightened as we initially said a few minutes ago because it’s so tempting to think of this as a choice. It’s like, just stop watching tv. Just stop watching this. And yet we know because of the way the algorithms work and the way that things are phrased in content, that it really does kind of victimize people.

Dr. Sarah (13:20):

And also though, at the same time, I really do feel like I can understand why this mom could be feeling really angry and frustrated with her mom. I am trying to think of ways to help the person who wrote this question be able to depersonalize some of her mom’s where her mom is at right now and look at it at the very least more neutrally and objectively and maybe even with some compassion for her mom and understanding of how it might’ve gotten to this point. And also that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t get to be mad or angry or frustrated or more importantly have boundaries around that behavior because you can have empathy and understand why someone might be doing what they’re doing and still not be okay with what they’re doing and be able to say, especially if it’s impacting your kids, be able to say like, no, I am not okay with that. We can’t talk about this stuff before.

Dr. Rebecca (14:18):

I think that’s exactly what I was going to say. Exactly what I was going to say. I was going to say one thing that helps me have compassion is when people are tremendously religious, which I’m not, and they might feel that something I’m doing let’s say is going to lead me to end up in hell. And so they’re going to tell me that over and over again. And if I want to have compassion for that person, it’s like they really think they’re helping me. They really, really, if I put myself in their shoes, and you could say this for the parent in question of the parent of the writer, she really, really thinks you are not thinking about this the correct way and she’s trying to save you. She really, if you put yourself in history, she’s really trying to save you. And so you can have compassion in that way and you’re still allowed to say, I don’t. I need you to stop saying that or I’m not going to be able to spend time around you. So again, it’s this example of holding compassion for the person whose mindset is so different from your own while also saying, I am not going to spend time hearing about how I’m going to hell for two hours.

Dr. Sarah (15:31):

Knowing about it can be politically, I mean, let’s be really honest, we are living in a time where politics are splitting up families that didn’t used to be. I mean, maybe rarely, but that is a very common.

Dr. Rebecca (15:46):

Well that’s because, like that’s kind of the point. I would argue that it’s not politics anymore. That’s why I think religion is a much more apt example. And that’s why I think in the beginning of the episode, we talked about the words like brainwashing and is constantly doing this in this all the, I don’t think it’s what we used to call political versus not political.

Dr. Sarah (16:10):

It’s extremism. Extremism in any situation, political things can be very divisive among families and they might not be extremism. Whereas there is now become, and it’s unfortunately more mainstream, I think there are extremist takes on politics that are becoming something. To your point, Rebecca, totally different than what they seem at face value. There are extremist political groups, and that is something that people are becoming more vulnerable to getting desensitized to the point of actual brainwashing. That’s not political, that’s extremism and that’s really challenging.

Dr. Rebecca (16:54):

And so I think with mom, it’s about, as we said, it’s about grieving, feeling the frustration, feeling the anger, feeling the hurt, all the things, processing that on her own and then figuring out to what we were just saying, what are going to be her boundaries with regard to the time that she wants to spend with her mother and the time she wants her kids to spend around her mother. I will say the one other point I wanted to make is that when she said her mother saying awful things around her kids, our kids are resilient, and it may be depending on the age of her kids that it’s worth talking to her kids about this. So we’re going to spend time with grandma. Here’s five things that I love so much about grandma, and here’s five things that are really hard about grandma for me right now, and things she might say or things depending on the age of the kids she can prep her kids for, but also to know that if her grandmother happens to say something that in her mind is awful or whatever word she used, you can always post game with your kids.

(18:01):

It’s not like one comment is going to kind of devastate your kids and hurt them forever. Forever. And there will be no recourse you can take, and this is all a bit of a moving target and you can process with your kids, even really young kids about some of this stuff in a way that might actually be useful.

Dr. Sarah (18:23):

I’ll just say one other thing too because I have a sort of a strategy around boundary setting that might be helpful just to give this listener a very concrete strategy in terms of setting boundaries, because I think there’s nuance to boundaries, and I talk a lot about this idea of there’s different kinds of boundaries. There’s internal boundaries, external boundaries, and physical boundaries. And you don’t always have to pick just one. You can be flexible and apply which one works best for you, but an internal boundary is when you just hold that boundary on the inside. It’s like, okay, I, she’s got this belief, I have mine. If she says a bunch of stuff to me that I don’t agree with, I can simply internally hold up a wall or a barrier against that coming in and bothering me and upsetting me and say, that’s her stuff, not my stuff.

(19:14):

That’s an internal boundary. It doesn’t require cooperation on the part of the other person for it to be held, which can be, I think very helpful in some situations where the other person isn’t capable of respecting a boundary. An external boundary does require the other person’s cooperation for it to be upheld, right? That’s saying explicitly, Hey, when you talk about this, it’s upsetting to me. I’d prefer it if we did not have conversations about this topic, especially in front of the kids. That’s an external boundary. It only works if the other person agrees to do it or is capable of doing it. And then if chronically, you’re setting external boundaries and the other person is not meeting you halfway there and respecting your boundaries, then we talk about physical boundaries. That’s when you say, I need to limit my time with this person, or I need to limit my children’s time with this person. And that’s just physically not actually being in proximity. So I think that there’s just always feel like it’s helpful to understand you have permission to use all different kinds of strategies when setting boundaries and you have to kind of play around and see what works best for you, but this’s hard.

Dr. Rebecca (20:30):

Absolutely. I think that’s great. And again, and I think the concrete nature of it is helpful. And I think just to sum up, I guess the non concrete is to my mind, certainly the most important piece of this. And it sounds like this listener is doing that and it’s a process and it’s like this constant like, wait, what happened and how and did I see this coming? And was there anything I could have done and how do I feel about it? And I’m grieving and how can I stay attached to this person, but also set boundaries. All that is internal work. This listener is doing it. And so if we don’t have anything that feels particularly easy or helpful, it’s because, yeah, what you’re feeling is real. This is really, really hard stuff and we can’t fix it. We can’t fix it for you.

Dr. Sarah (21:21):

And you can’t fix it for her. You don’t have to fix this for your mom. And there’s some acceptance and radical acceptance maybe that work that can be done around that too, that’s really hard, but it’s not your responsibility to solve it either. Just to hold your own own process and your own boundaries. I hope that’s helpful. Thank you, Rebecca, for your wisdom as always, and we’ll talk soon.

Dr. Rebecca (21:52):

So long.

Dr. Sarah (21:55):Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.