Dear Suicide Loss Survivors

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I was recently asked if I wanted to contribute something to a book for survivors of suicide. With my client’s death by suicide anniversary being in March, of course I wanted to share my love letter to survivors here in a blog too. With abundant compassion and zero judgement, Khara

There’s nothing more painful that feeling like you’ve failed the person who has died by suicide. The shame. The self-doubt. The going over the last time you saw them or spoke to them, wondering what you missed. Believe me, I’ve been there. As a fellow loss survivor, I want you to know you are not alone. Each death by suicide impacts at minimum, 135 people, so of course you are feeling the loss of the person who has died. You may feel grief-stricken. Bewildered. Angry. This loss will forever change you, and that’s okay too. It’s to be expected. I hope you’ll consider this acronym as a compassionate guide through your heaviest moments of grief and despair, knowing that even the darkest nights have to move into dawn eventually.

L-Listen to your needs

Your needs after the loss of someone to suicide will change moment to moment. People will ask you what you need, and you may find yourself frozen, in shock, or mute, not knowing what you need. Try to find moments to slow things down, asking yourself what you need in that exact moment. Maybe you need to cry. Need a hug. Need to be left alone. Need to eat. Need to sleep. Let’s normalize that your needs change minute to minute and it’s okay to ask for what you need.

E-Embrace grief and loss work

No one is “fine” after losing someone to suicide. There isn’t a timeline for healing either. You will heal on your own time, in your own way. How do you want to engage in grief work? Do you want to work with a therapist? A coach? A mentor? A spiritual guide? This isn’t something that you wake up one day and feel okay about, so don’t discount the power of grief and loss work to help your healing journey.

A- Ask for help

For so many survivors, asking for help feels the hardest. Perhaps we don’t want to burden others. Perhaps we’ve received messages that hurt us further in the wake of losing someone to suicide. Please don’t let other people’s discomfort with suicide prevent you from asking for help from folks who are able and willing to hold space for you. There are places of support and community waiting with open arms to help you grieve and heal. You don’t have to do this alone.

N- Name meaning

This last idea oftentimes takes the longest. There is not a day when losing the person you did to suicide won’t matter. Survivors aren’t looking for acceptance as much as some form of neutrality or surrender that comes with time. After moving out of excruciating pain and sadness, there will come a time where you can discover meaning from this life-altering loss. Maybe meaning is holding dear the happy memories of this person. Maybe you write about your experience for other survivors. Maybe it’s participating in a suicide prevention event. Perhaps it’s honoring this person’s birthday or another day of significance. 

Making meaning is uniquely yours, and the experience of naming meaning can feel like you’re finally experiencing post-traumatic growth as your body learns to hold both pain and gratitude for the person you’ve lost. Talk about them. Think of them. Americans can be strange with grief, but I hope this sharing and so many others’ stories can lift you up amidst the grief and questioning that come with suicide loss. We are not okay, but we will be.

The Psychology of Money and Your Secondary Income Streams

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

In financial therapy, it’s common for us to talk about how money is emotional. Very emotional. Some would even say that money is 90% emotion, 10% logic. With this in mind, we can lean into what we know about money for our secondary income streams, which includes your ideal consumer’s investment in your trainings, courses, and retreats. Let’s explore three key points of the psychology of money in your therapy practice and offerings below.

1. People like smaller numbers over larger numbers.

Folks love a good sale, and they like to see the value of what they are getting (i.e. on sale for $75, $150 value). However, when it comes to bigger purchases like groups, masterminds, and coaching programs, people prefer to see the breakdown of what it costs per meeting for an ongoing commitment. For example, $40 per one hour meeting for six weeks versus $240 total per person. There’s something approachable about the smaller number that gives us self-permission to invest in a bigger purchase rather than balking at a larger number and having the immediate thought of “I can’t afford that.” It might be the best of both worlds to offer the weekly/monthly breakdown and then an upfront, full cost that saves your ideal consumer some money. This practice is very common with other products we’ve purchased, with an example being $20/month (option #1) or $220 up front, saving the buyer $20 for making the bigger, one-time purchase as option #2.

2. Certain numbers are comforting.

Have you ever experimented with exploring what numbers feel good to people wanting to buy from you? Although this is subject to change as things evolve, folks currently are most comfortable with odd numbers or round numbers when making a purchase because these numbers are familiar. Think about it. From the days of advertising on TV, consumers are comfortable seeing $19.99 or $19.95 over $20. Or $47 over $44. Or $15 over $14. How about $199 compared to $200? In the therapy world, seeing $165 over $162 or $185 over $174? Notice what comes up for you. Every human has a purchase amount that gives them pause, and so setting rates or pricing below that number could be a way for them to find their enthusiastic yes to what you have to offer. For example, does your ideal audience balk at $800 but feel comfortable with $600? Do they like to see $99 instead of $100? This is your invitation to get curious and start experimenting with pricing, which can be helpful tool when launching your secondary income streams.

3. Know your ideal audience.

I may sound like a broken record to some folks in my community for this one, but it continues to be true! Knowing your audience and what they are comfortable paying for is key. What’s the market for offerings similar to yours? Are the entities or other professionals who’ve set the bar on pricing? Are you competing with big mental health entities that set the precedent on prices for trainings, as one example? By doing a little market research, you can do a temperature check on the range of prices that your ideal audience prefers. Take that a step further and ask them to tell you what they’d pay for your offering. It could be an anonymous survey or a poll in a social media group. By asking your ideal audience what they’d pay, you can get a better sense of people’s willingness to invest in what you are passionate about building!

What would you add to the psychology of money and secondary income streams? There are so many other working pieces to consider, but hopefully these three tips give you a place to start when launching secondary income streams in 2025! Happy New Year!

Khara Croswaite Brindle is a Certified Financial Therapist serving other therapists to help them launch secondary income streams as part of burnout prevention.

My Keynote at Colorado Counseling Association’s 2024 Annual Conference

“How’s it going?” My close community kept checking in on me as a I prepared to give my keynote at the Colorado Counseling Association Annual Conference in Keystone the next day. “I keep crying at certain parts of my speech,” I shared. I’d already given myself a grief hangover just writing my speech, now I was doing my best to stay composed as I said it out loud. “It’s okay to cry, your message is important,” each of them said. I agreed with them and continued to prepare. When it was time, I stood in front of almost 300 members of my community and introduced them to the term confidential grief. Defined by Dr. Lena Salpietro as losing a client to suicide and not being able to talk about it, I invited the audience to apply confidential grief to all the experiences in our industry that feel secretive due to feelings of shame, guilt, and judgement from others. I named the Big Five Fears of client suicide, client death, client violence, subpoena, and grievance as examples. We got to know our shame monsters together as a group. I had chosen to share my personal and professional journey of becoming a Confidential Grief Specialist. 

To help my colleagues understand the impact of confidential grief, I took them through six impactful and painful points in my 14 years as a therapist. These were stories that weren’t public knowledge due to confidential grief, and I named them as moments of self-doubt, shame, and leadership trauma. We grieved the loss of community members to violence and clients to suicide. We shared outrage at circumstances outside our control. And this time, I didn’t cry so hard that I lost my place. Instead I carried that emotion with me as I embodied vulnerability to a group of people I felt I was just starting to know more fully. 

As the talk continued, there were invitations to laugh, cry, and connect. I shared how I’d learned from my experiences that introversion is welcome (and necessary sometimes), vulnerability in leadership is allowed, and stories eliminate isolation in our field and as humans seeking connection against burnout. We talked about how to combat confidential grief through building community, showing up fully, and creating healing spaces for ourselves and others. I introduced bread crumbs imagery as bite-sized messages of hope and healing for folks to find when they were ready. Lastly, I shared a beautiful image on screen to start and close the talk. “There are not enough words” became an anchor amidst waves of emotion that come with confidential grief, and I invited my audience to share those words with others.

After my keynote was finished, I was given the gift of my community approaching me in both in the moments after and for hours into the next day to share their stories. You felt safe to share your losses of client suicide, your leadership trauma, and how you needed the term confidential grief to feel more seen. I heard countless exclamations that having a name for your experiences (both confidential grief and leadership trauma) was encouraging you to heal from here. I’m confident in the ripple effect of collective healing that will come from this gathering of clinicians, and find myself full of gratitude and with ‘not enough words’ to express the profound effect this experience will have on me for years to come. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the collective healing and sharing together at CCA’s annual conference, I can’t wait to hear where your journey takes you from here.

A reflection on my Keynote titled Combatting Confidential Grief, Colorado Counseling Association Annual Conference

The Human in the Helper: You cannot heal what you don’t reveal

Dr. Kendal Wellington Humes is a trailblazer. As a doctorate-level psychotherapist in private practice, he’s recently taken on the task of building a behavioral health program from the ground up in academia, as it’s first department chair. He’s had a busy few years, however they haven’t been without challenges. “I’m winning and I’m losing irreplaceable things.” In the past 8 years in Colorado, Dr. Kendal has experienced the loss of a parent, godparent, pet loss, and two painful divorces. “My private practice has kept me alive,” he shared.

“People see my progress but not my process,” Dr. Kendal reflected. He’s no stranger to wanting to excel since he’s achieved four degrees and multiple letters after his name before his mid-thirties. Educational and career achievements provided him a sense of purpose and control when his personal life felt rocky. “No one can take that from me,” he reflected.

Dr. Kendal named the pressure he feels to succeed. “I can’t afford to be mediocre. I’m Black. I’m an immigrant. I’m tall. I’m dark-skinned. And I’m openly gay. I don’t have the privilege of being mediocre.” He’s achieved quite a bit in his career so far, working in community mental health, offering supervision, starting a private practice, and now working in academia. He spoke of the bittersweetness of achieving success while grieving. “People are celebrating the successes but not the losses. Transparency can be weaponized.” Dr. Kendal also spoke to the pressure mental health professionals feel to have things all figured out. “We get the message that we should know better. We should be better.” As a mentor to younger generations of therapists and professionals, It hasn’t stopped him from sharing the hardships as well as the victories.

“I’ve been through divorce. My father died.” Dr. Kendal has experienced depression and he’s felt immense grief. “I didn’t feel like I could give people an honest answer about how I was doing. People don’t always understand what sacrifices have to be made for the successes they see.” Dr. Kendal also recognizes he’s hardest on himself. When experiencing divorce, he found himself saying, “I can’t even heal my own person. I can’t heal my own shit.”

Now Dr. Kendal is all about seeing both sides. “I can see the good and the bad. You cannot heal what you don’t reveal.” He describes his approach as strengths-based and holds onto some humor, even when things get heavy. “I have a strong sense of self. I had to forgive myself.” Dr. Kendal has similar ideas for others going through immense pain in their personal life. “Keep moving. Fall on your back instead of your face. When you fall on your back, you can still see what direction you need to go.”

As for himself, Dr. Kendal’s purpose has become clearer thanks to added perspective and deeper insight from the losses he’s experienced. “Sometimes letting go will put you right where you need to be. Stop fighting.” He’s attempting to take the changes in stride, knowing he has more people to meet and engage in his journey as a psychotherapist. “I’m a wounded healer,” he named. “Failures can be a win too. How will failures help us grow?”

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about the Human in the Helper Series!

The Human in the Helper: I felt better pregnant than any other time in my adult life

Emily is passionate about mental health, Medicaid practices, and her pre-teen daughter. She serves as a consultant to therapy practices taking Medicaid and to folks wanting to build quality substance treatment programs that meet community needs. Although she’s feeling strong mentally and physically these days, she’s suffered from depression on and off in adulthood since college. Then Emily got pregnant and stopped her antidepressant. “It wasn’t contraindicated, but I wanted to be extra cautious.”

Although her pregnancy was labeled geriatric because of her age, Emily reported she felt her healthiest while pregnant, both physically and mentally. She remembers wanting to go with the flow regarding labor and delivery, which was the plan until her daughter decided to come 10 days late. At that point, her doctors scheduled an induction that she felt catapulted her into some postpartum depression and anxiety symptoms. “I remember questioning if I should have had a child. They kept us at the hospital for a few days because my daughter had jaundice. I struggled to breastfeed.”

Emily isn’t the only woman to notice a dramatic shift in mood based on the hormonal changes of postpartum. Because of her history with depression, she felt like she knew more what to look for, even if it took her awhile to seek support. “I didn’t have a therapist or medication provider at the time. That could have made my timeline to getting help look different,” she reflected. Emily noticed depression, anxiety, and being quick to cry as some symptoms that things weren’t right. “I was quick to cry and I’m not a crier.” Amidst balancing being a new mom, she shifted jobs postpartum as well. Unfortunately, her symptoms got worse before they got better.

“My relationship was impacted by my mood.” She realized things weren’t sustainable as they were, even with a schedule change, which resulted in separating from her daughter’s father. “I know now we weren’t compatible.” At the time of the separation, Emily was hard on herself, adding the relationship end to her list of things she didn’t feel she was doing well. Then she got the support she needed to regulate her hormones again.

In the present, Emily holds a lot of compassion for colleagues who are trying to balance work with being a new parent. “All these things that we think we are prepared for, we’re not. Be forgiving of yourself.” She encourages new parents to go with the flow, while also recognizing how hard this is when caring for an infant. Adjusting and embracing parenthood isn’t a perfect science, but Emily wants people to feel hopeful that things will get better. If colleagues find themselves getting stuck in the “shoulds” of parenting or work-life demands, Emily suggests channeling our inner therapists for some added gentleness towards ourselves. “Think of things you would work on with your client. Notice what you would say to them and say those things to yourself.”

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about the Human in the Helper Series!

The Human in the Helper: You become invisible when you become a widow

Claudia is one of few art therapists in her area, and she’s passionate about helping people paint their process. It’s something that helped her in her own process when her husband died. “The hospice sitters told me when it was okay to sleep, when it was okay to work.” Claudia chose to reduce her private practice caseload in response to her husband’s frequent doctors appointments and the emotional fatigue she was experiencing as the result of his decline. He died at the same time Americans were reeling from 9/11. “It was my own personal 9/11, my own painful loss,” Claudia reflected.

After her husband died, Claudia experienced immense grief. “Grief makes you feel crazy, my thoughts were crazy.” She sat shiva and underwent grief counseling at hospice. Claudia discovered her one and only instance of suicidal thought at this time, before being gently reminded by her doctor that she still had family left. After her own grief counseling, Claudia was asked to lead 4 week art therapy grief groups for others experiencing loss.

In offering a “Painting from the Heart” groups to therapists, Claudia finally felt ready to paint her grief from the loss of her husband. It was powerful, it was visceral, and she finally felt seen by others when they looked at her art. “Then I had enough of drawing the process of grief,” she said. Claudia was missing her family and suggested to her daughter that she’d like to move closer to her. It was then that Claudia closed her private practice to relocate to Denver. A friend supported this decision by sharing her own perspective after the loss of her children. “What are you waiting for?”

Moving to Denver was a process for Claudia, who needed to refer out clients, secure her files, and close the practice to open one in another state. She currently enjoys working with clients who are ready to embrace art therapy or sand tray work to process their feelings. “Painting my process helped me slow down with my clients, to go deeper. The feelings goes from being inside to outside.” Claudia self-discloses with clients when it’s clinically relevant, helping them do their own work when they are ready.

Although Claudia is happy to be closer to her daughter and enjoys her client work, she still finds herself adjusting to a new state. “You become invisible when you become a widow.” She spoke to the shift in dynamics from having friends as a couple to having friends as an individual. Claudia named it’s hard to make friends in a new state, especially at an older age. That doesn’t stop her from being involved in volunteering, community, and choir, which serve as points of connection at this newest stage of her life.

As for colleagues, she has some ideas for fellow professionals going through the loss of a spouse. “Ask for help. Stay on top of finances. Write an ethical will.” Claudia acknowledged the tears that came to her eyes when sharing her ethical will with her family. Unlike a last will and testament, an ethical will speaks to the moral inheritance and qualities passed down to family members. It’s an emotional process of writing out wishes for loved ones and then sharing them out loud with those loved ones. Claudia encourages everyone to engage in this process as part of connection and healing. She also recognizes the importance of utilizing supports for grief work. “Try art. Draw it out or engage an art therapist or sand play therapist.” Going through the loss of her spouse has helped Claudia see her own strengths. “I’m stronger than I ever wanted to be. I can do this. I am doing this.”

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about the Human in the Helper Series!

The Human in the Helper: It’s easier to prioritize our kids over ourselves

Jenny knows what it’s like to juggle many roles. At one point in the pandemic, she was running a small private practice, a second business of an online community, and working a full time job with a toddler at home. When her second child arrived, she was grateful for family to be present immediately after her son’s birth, an experience she didn’t get with her daughter who was born in September 2020. Jenny brought their son home, and days later noticed a rash developing on his tiny body but thought it was related to the 100 plus degree heat of Houston where they live. At her son’s check up, the doctor had concerns. “She calmly said, ‘you’re going to the emergency room now.’ I felt like I was in the dark as to what was going on but took him right away so they could run tests,” Jenny recalled. Her son was nine days old and remained in the hospital for three days as they waited for test results.

Jenny’s son had a staph infection. Although it was a relief to know the cause and receive treatment, Jenny found herself in self-blame. “Did I cause this to happen? Were there too many people around him at his birth? Should I have done something different?” Jenny isn’t alone in having these thoughts as a woman and mother. “I struggle to accept help. I tend to not rely on others and do things myself.” But as she stayed in the hospital with her son, relying on her spouse and others to keep things going at home was necessary.

A second opportunity to accept help from loved ones came when her son got a second staph infection at two months old while visiting family in Colorado. Jenny found herself telling clients about her son as she needed to cancel and reschedule appointments in order to address his needs. “It’s easier to prioritize our kids needs over our own,” Jenny reflected. She wants to operate from a ‘family comes first’ place but recognizes how that can feel challenging to herself and others when holding the role of primary earner in a household.

Figuring out our own needs as therapists and small business owners is a work in progress. Jenny had to learn how to slow down to meet her own needs. “Our bodies tell us when they’ve been ignored and neglected, and then we don’t have a choice in how to practice self-care.” As a mom, woman, and therapist who keeps others’ needs in mind, Jenny named the experience as “weaponized self-care, how are we supposed to do that?” She spoke to how it felt hypocritical to help clients and colleagues practice self-care when she wasn’t doing it well herself. Now she gives herself more grace and owns it when it happens. “I’m trying to model self-care but it’s not perfect,” she said.

Being a mom of two small children has also influenced her approach to self-care. “Our kids are purely living in the present, they model this for us. It’s also how we can recognize we aren’t taking care of ourselves in that present moment.” Jenny brings this insight into her online community for trauma therapists, who are working on their own journeys of balance and self-care. “We can join kids in the present moment, supporting healing and self-care through meaningful connection.”

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about the Human in the Helper Series!

The Human in the Helper: I was overwhelmed by how angry I felt

Julia is a mom and therapist who values working from an attachment lens with her clients. Becoming a new parent in the pandemic has also influenced her therapeutic work in ways she didn’t expect. “I was lonely. My husband was renovating our house and I was alone with our baby.” Julia describes feeling isolated and missing her supports due to them not being able to travel in the early stages of COVID-19. The absence of her spouse every day—who was attempting to make a house ready to become their home—and the absence of friends and family sparked anger in Julia. “I was overwhelmed by how angry I felt.” Although she felt loving and present with her son, Julia described significant anger showing up anytime she was apart from him and able to feel her feelings. “Then I felt shame for feeling so angry.”

Julia knew she needed to better understand where the anger was coming from. “Reading the book ‘Burn It Down’ really validated my feelings.” She discovered that many women’s postpartum experiences involve anger or rage in addition to anxiety and depression. That it wasn’t unusual to feel anger followed by shame. Julia knew that part of her feelings of anger was due to missing supports that would normalize her experiences and allow her to vent in healthy ways. “Feeling our anger allows it to move, which allows us to let go of shame.” Julia didn’t have this opportunity in the earliest stages of her parenting.

Since resources were limited in the pandemic, Julia found herself leaning on her lactation consultant, who would mask up and visit the home, reassuring Julia that her experiences were normal. “She was like a therapist, she was an angel.” Julia found things shifting for the better when her family was able to move into the renovated house and she was seeing her husband more regularly again. Then she started being able to interact with friends and family, which also improved her mental health.

Working with adults and fellow parents, Julia reflects on how her postpartum and parenting experiences have expanded her compassion for other parents. “I can see how they are stretched thin trying to parent and work,” she shared. As a therapist who operates from attachment and Internal Family Systems (IFS) lenses, Julia says the grace and compassion she has for other parents has only increased with her own lived experience as a parent who has battled anger and shame. She recognizes that without the validation of others and supports in place, mental health is negatively impacted. “What I learned about anger is why it’s here and how normal it is,” Julia shared.

Now Julia offers a parents of toddlers group where other women speak about their anger. It’s the community and safe space Julia was craving herself in a critical moment of her postpartum journey. “When unresolved anger turns inward, or when it’s not expressed appropriately, it makes us sick.” Julia is determined to create spaces for anger and shame to be expressed so they don’t fester and make people worse. She has noticed how suppressed emotions contribute to mental health conditions and wants things to be different for women and mothers. “My understanding of anger has given me a whole new perspective on mental health,” Julia named. Through IFS parts work, Julia is helping clients better understand their anger so they can process it appropriately. “Anger is here for a reason,” she shared, “we just have to discover why it’s here.”

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about the Human in the Helper Series!

Why Did I Write a Book about Mother-Daughter Estrangement?

Understanding Ruptured Mother-Daughter Relationships was inspired by my client work in therapy with women of all different backgrounds, but it was also informed by brief estrangement within my family tree, as well as four generations of estrangement in the family I’m married into. It’s a book that looks at a pattern I was seeing in the women I was serving as a therapist, specifically the energy estrangement was taking up in their lives and the possible stages they could experience as the result of a relationship rupture with their mom. I first wrote about the stages I was seeing—named the Estrangement Energy Cycle—in 2020. We were in the thick of the pandemic, and I think I was holding onto something that made sense at a time where nothing in the greater world made sense. I released a blog on the cycle that colleagues responded favorably to, affirming that they were seeing what I was seeing in their therapeutic work as well. That was when I knew I had a future book to write on the subject.

Fast forward to 2022, I’d self-published three books in three years on subjects that felt important to me and relevant to the populations I was serving. I had just become a mother to my own daughter and was on maternity leave when a request to review a book proposal came through, with an open invitation to pitch book ideas to the publisher. So my entrepreneurial brain said, why not? I was eight weeks postpartum when I submitted my book proposal, and my daughter was four months old when I started researching and writing this book. 

It’s not lost on me that I was writing a book about mother-daughter estrangement while fostering healthy attachment with my own infant daughter. Upon learning about my book deal with a publisher, my mom asked me outright if there was anything I needed to tell her. That conversation still makes me chuckle since I know she was just making sure that things between us were okay and it showed she was interested in this topic too. I’d had a couple tumultuous teenage years with my mom that I reflected upon while writing this book, which only strengthened my gratitude for our close relationship in my adult years as I watch her deep and unconditional love for my baby girl as her first grandchild. My mom had been estranged from her dad for a period of time as a young adult when her parents divorced after his infidelity. I know that my grandma’s devastation about the divorce influenced my mom’s decision to stop speaking to him. My grandma was so hurt and angry that I recall her speaking poorly of my grandfather to my sister and I as early as five years old, encouraging us to call him a derogatory nickname in her household as a sign of allegiance to her. This memory shaped a chapter of the book on the ripple effect on families, where family members feel pressured to declare loyalties to one family member or another as the result of the estrangement. 

Fortunately for my mom, she was able to reconcile with her dad and maintained a healthy, loving relationship with him for the remainder of his life, all while setting boundaries with her mom on how she expressed her hurt and distrust in front of us kids. Boundaries in families were again revisited when watching my in-laws pursue estrangement that resulted in four generations not speaking to one another over the course of several years. Observing the walking-on-eggshells dynamic, the justification for broken ties, and the sadness and hurt that resulted from those estrangements informed multiple chapters of this book, including what community members could say or do to support someone who is estranged. 

As for the writing process of this book, I would read and research estrangement during my daughter’s many naps as an infant, and would write for two hours every night after putting her to bed. Oftentimes the writing came easily, although sometimes I spent my evening reworking a chapter or story to address writer’s block and anchor myself in what content was coming next. A silly memory I have of this time was sitting in my closet on the floor, writing away while trying not to wake the baby, all while remaining several feet away in case she fussed or needed me.

My favorite part of this book was capturing stories of women going through the estrangement energy cycle, inspired by clients I’d served as a therapist for the past decade. Recalling my clients’ hard work was a gift, they had inspired this book’s content from the very beginning and writing about their stories felt like the work had come full circle. Not only was this book capturing the beautiful, vulnerable work clients had done for themselves, it would serve as a beacon of hope for other adult daughters exploring estrangement and reconciliation with their mothers.

Having colleagues to survey and beta reader feedback of the first draft helped flushed out the content even more. My mom has been the first reader and editor of all my books, so her feedback felt very symbolic for this book in particular. It even spurred some additional compassionate conversations about my grandma from the lenses of abuse and trauma, that I felt helped my mom heal from rocky relationship moments in their mother-daughter dynamic too. In writing every night, I finished and submitted my manuscript in four months time! Then came the journey of cover design and awaiting the finished product to put out in the world.

As I reflect on this journey today, I’m feeling so grateful for the process and connections this book has brought into my life as an author, therapist, and mother. Hearing from clinicians and adult daughters as readers of this book has been very fulfilling, and I hope it encourages healing for many readers, including the mothers and daughters within my own family tree.

Five Tips for Talking to Kids about Estrangement

“Mom, why don’t you talk to Grandma?”

Being an adult in a family with estranged loved ones feels challenging. Being a child witnessing that dynamic can be even more difficult. What does an adult daughter say to her child who asks why she doesn’t have a grandma? How do the adults in a child’s life explain estrangement? What can be shared when a child comes home with a family tree assignment and asks why they don’t have lots of family members like other kids? 

Over the years, child therapists and grief experts have emphasized the importance of straightforward and truthful answers to children regarding all sorts of difficult topics, including death and suicide. When it comes to the emotionally charged topic of estrangement, the same rules can apply. Let’s look at five tips for speaking to kids about estrangement:

1. Keep it Short and Straightforward

You may have heard of the acronym KISS. In our example, KISS stands for Keep it Short and Straightforward. The length of the explanation is directly related to the child’sage. Meaning a short, simple answer for a young child and a potentially longer, more detailed explanation for a teenager who wants to know what happened. Straightforward is important to emphasize because it captures the importance of being honest in our disclosures as parents. Just as mental health professionals would dissuade a parent from encouraging a child to view death as “the person is just sleeping,” to avoid or lie about a family estrangement could also backfire and have harmful consequences. 

2. Breathe

It’s understandable that your child’s questions about the estrangement can bring up emotions for you. It’s also not uncommon to overshare when feeling anxious or irritated. A great way to keep your emotions in check is to take a breath and ask your child what they want to know about the estrangement. Their answer may surprise you! 

3. Share as Much as They Want to Know

Don’t panic! As we alluded to in the previous tip, kids may have a simple thing they want to know that surprises you. They may have a quick question that doesn’t warrant significant anxiety, like asking where the person lives or if they look like anyone else in the family, or how old they are. Or they may want to know more about the conflict that led up to the estrangement, which would warrant a more detailed response. Even in this instance, taking a moment to pause allows you to remain mindful of what you share, keeping it focused on simple, straightforward details while grounding yourself in your emotions to avoid unintentionally oversharing with your child.

4. Validate their Feelings

It goes without saying that acknowledging your child’s emotions can go a long way in this conversation. How are they feeling with the information you shared? What if they are feeling sad, angry, or confused? Do they feel it’s safe to express these emotions to you?

5. Encourage other questions if they have them now or in the future.

Sometimes kids don’t know what other questions they have until they have some time to process what you’ve already shared. By saying out loud that they are welcome to ask other questions at any time provides a sense of reassurance and safety that it’s okay to come to you with questions, which most parents want their kids to do when navigating difficult topics of all kinds.

What would you add? With one in 12 people being estranged from at least one family member, the likelihood of kids having questions about family estrangement is pretty high. Check out our model of this conversation in our children’s book Penny McGee’s Family Tree: Talking to kids about estrangement. You can do this!