LIVING WELL Family Estrangement

Estrangement within families is certainly something that many keep quiet from others as they are afraid of the stigma estrangement implies. For parents of adult children who are no longer speaking to them, this estrangement can be seen as shameful and embarrassing as if this fact says to others outside the family, that they did something horribly wrong for this to happen. However, what you will learn about today is not only how common this phenomena is, but what we can do about it.

Dr. Joshua Coleman is a psychologist in private practice and Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. A frequent guest on NPR and Today, his advice has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Chicago Tribune and other publications. A popular conference speaker, he has given talks to the faculties at Harvard, the Weill Cornell Department of Psychiatry and other academic institutions.

He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and has written four books: The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony (St. Martin’s Press); The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (St. Martin’s Press); When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along (HarperCollins); and Married with Twins: Life, Love and the Pursuit of Marital Harmony. His books have been translated into Chinese, Croatian, and Korean, and are also available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.

Dr. Coleman is co-editor with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use: a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family. He is also co-founder with researcher Dr. Becca Bland of Standing Together, a center for advancing awareness of family estrangement. He is the father of three adult children, has a teenage grandson and lives with his wife in the San Francisco Bay Area.

​He also writes music for television which has appeared on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Lethal Weapon, Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Longmire, Shameless, RuPaul's Drag Race, and many other shows.

Nicolette Hume our host had the wonderful opportunity to interview Dr. Coleman for the LIVING WELL Show and share with our audience a unique point of view about Family Estrangement.

Enjoy!