Hi, I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland.

And I'm Sasha Ayyad, an adolescent therapist in the United States.

And this is Gender, a wider lens, a podcast dedicated to the shifting concepts around gender in our contemporary culture.

Through in-depth interviews, personal stories, and psychological exploration, we seek to open up the discourse around this hot button issue.

Join us as we look at gender from a wider lens.

Hi Stella.

How's it going Sasha? How's life? Life is great. I am so glad we finally got to talk to

Dr Joshua Coleman today. Yeah, it was really, really, really good.

Really, I think a really helpful discussion for anybody who's a parent.

It's not just parents of a strange,

parents who are estranged. This is for, it's kind of a kind of discussion about how

hard it is to be a parent, but also how there's a culture of really harshness towards parents

that Joshua has completely taken up on.

Yeah, so he's an estrangement expert and as we talk about today he is a psychologist who started

realizing when he became estranged from his adult daughter that there wasn't really a lot of

resources out there that were helpful. It was more like

therapists suggesting that parents, you know, get really aggressive about it and defend themselves.

And actually Joshua's strategy is parents need to find ways to kind of

own up to errors that they have made, mistakes they have made, and he talks about how the cultural shift in what is expected of parents has been so massive and so now a lot of young people feel like if they are upset about anything their parents have done that they should go no contact, quote unquote, or cut them off and sometimes by the encouragement of a therapist or a peer group or a spouse.

So we got into so much and there was of course lots and lots of overlap with

parents of gender questioning young adults who may make particular demands of them and then cut them off.

And so it was a very rich conversation.

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