You Are Heard

As Mother’s Day approaches, I want to remind you that you are heard. I hear you. We, parents going through this, hear and understand you. Before this estrangement, being a mother may have been a core component of your identity. Now, with the advertising and general ramp-up to this holiday, you may be facing recurring […]

Ruminating

The word “ruminating” has come up in session a couple of times lately. Ours is a situation that certainly lends to that sort of deep thinking, though it’s no secret that there comes a point at which it does a disservice. If all or most of your waking hours are spent ruminating on estrangement, you […]

A Sweet Suite in Time

It was just before midnight, and my 13-year-old daughter and I were stranded in a poorly-lit parking lot behind an IHOP as a strange car approached. We were several miles from home when the disintegrating driver’s side front tire gave us no choice but to stop right there. She looked at me uneasily as my mind […]

Sending a Message

Part One: On our recent friends trip to Cross Plains, Tx, I took the opportunity to talk about estrangement with my lifelong friend, Whit McClendon. I opened by assuring him, as I assure you now, that this isn’t foreshadowing or a hint of anything whatsoever.  I asked a favor of him: In the event of my unexpected […]

Dr. Coleman Responds to the Article

In July of 2024, a counselor named Patrick Teahan responded to the recent New York Times article on parent-child estrangement. Teahan works with estranged adult children, and appeared to take issue with quotes and behaviors attributed to him. Teahan has been a focal point for estranged parent ire in the wake of the article. His portrayal as […]

Are You TOXIC?

“Toxic” is commonly used in the EAC community when addressing or talking about estranged parents. So, what does it mean? *Spoiler alert* It means almost nothing. For starters, in spite of its popularity in Reddit estrangement forums and elsewhere among the pro-estrangement, it is not a clinical term. And though I have not memorized the Diagnostic […]

“What Mike Said”

My late father struggled with grief. From the loss of his mother and his best friend Red within weeks of each other in 1977 to losing another bestie, Mike, decades later, Dad could be waylaid by grief seemingly out of nowhere. Mike emerged as Dad’s best friend when I was off living my young adult […]

Salvation on a Bicycle

I’m nine, riding my bike at night along the rocky shoulder of Highway 35 in Angleton, Texas. I’ve dropped the food I was dispatched to fetch, and I’m panicking. The moments in which we learn may appear unremarkable to the casual observer. Along that dark highway, I don’t know if any passersby saw my predicament. […]

The Starfish

“Keep on saving the world, one person at a time.” One of my best friends often says this to me at the end of a conversation, and it occurs to me that this concept is at the heart of some of my discomfort around the NYT article. There’s a story in which the tides deposit thousands of […]

I spent hours reading the articles and studies in that list, and my takeaway was… validation. In the counseling field, our stock in trade is the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. If the studies concluded that we have a sweeping epidemic of, say, narcissistic personality disorder, our field would take that as marching orders. We […]