Cutting Ties with Your Parents: Healing and Boundaries
About this episode
The episode discusses family estrangement and the complexities of setting boundaries with parents, featuring insights from psychotherapist Sharon Martin.
In this episode, I speak with Sharon Martin, LCSW, about her clinical work with adults navigating family estrangement and the complex process of deciding whether to limit or cut off contact with parents. Sharon, a psychotherapist with over 25 years of experience, specializes in working with adult children of alcoholics and individuals from dysfunctional family systems. Her work focuses on helping clients process the long term effects of developmental trauma and build healthier, more authentic lives. Sharon explains that many individuals seeking therapy may initially present with concerns such as anxiety, depression, or relationship difficulties, only to discover underlying patterns rooted in early family dynamics. These experiences often include chronic shame, hypervigilance, perfectionism, and a reliance on external validation, factors that can make navigating family relationships particularly challenging in adulthood. A central focus of the conversation is the decision-making process around estrangement. Sharon emphasizes that, contrary to common portrayals, estrangement is rarely a single, definitive event. Instead, it often involves cycles of limited contact, attempts at…
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