How To Reconnect with Your Kid After a Nasty Divorce
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Barbara survived a divorce so brutal that she refers to it as 'The War of the Roses.' Perhaps the most painful casualty was the severing of her relationship with her son, Ethan. Decades have passed and Ethan is now married with kids of his own, who Barbara adores. But due to their chilly, distant relationship, Barbara doesn't get to see them as much as she'd like. Can Barbara repair their broken relationship before it's too late? On this episode of How To!, the first in a two-part series, we bring on Amy Baker, a developmental psychologist who specializes in restoring family connections between parents and adult children. She has a specific method for writing a letter of amends that, more often than not, can lead to a breakthrough.
If you liked this episode, check out "How To Walk Away From an Impossible Parent."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He wasn't allowed to mention my name in his house, even at five. |
| 0:06.0 | It was considered not a topic of conversation and he wasn't allowed to mention it. |
| 0:13.0 | Welcome to How To. I'm science writer David Epstein. |
| 0:16.0 | Last year we released an episode called How to Walk Away from an Impossible Parent. |
| 0:21.0 | It was one of our most popular ever. It got over a million clicks |
| 0:24.0 | and we got dozens of emails from people venting about their own stormy relationships |
| 0:28.0 | with their parents. But we also got messages from parents |
| 0:32.0 | and some of those were admitting deep regrets for how things had gone with their kids. |
| 0:36.0 | A lot of those parents, they were anguished about it and they were dying to reconnect with their children. |
| 0:41.0 | I'm struggling with the remnants of the War of the Rose's Divorce in 1982, |
| 0:50.0 | which is a completely screwed up family. |
| 0:55.0 | Our listener this week is a woman we're going to call Barbara. |
| 0:58.0 | She's in her late 70s and she's a retired psychotherapist and nurse. |
| 1:02.0 | She's also a grandmother. |
| 1:04.0 | But the main issue for me, the one that I'm dealing with here, |
| 1:08.0 | is my difficulty in maintaining contact with my beloved grandsons |
| 1:15.0 | because my son is so estranged and on again, off again. |
| 1:22.0 | I'm always walking on eggshells and I'm always thinking about it. |
| 1:27.0 | Barbara actually has three grown children, two daughters and one son. |
| 1:31.0 | Her youngest, who will call Ethan, is in his 40s and lives nearby. |
| 1:35.0 | She's desperate to have a relationship with Ethan's 10 and 12-year-old boys, her grandsons. |
| 1:40.0 | But at the moment, she only sees them every couple of months at best. |
... |
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