Going no contact with a parent - my journey from loss to restoration

Well, hey everybody, and welcome back to Qualified, the place where incredible people share their stories of overcoming great adversity and loss to inspire you and give you hope. I'm Michelle Heaton. Families and family dynamics can be complicated In any home. Disagreements and misunderstandings are bound to happen, and we know minor conflicts between family members are normal, but ongoing tension, resentment and toxic interactions can be lasting sources of frustration. They can also tear relationships apart and have long-term effects on the health and well-being of those involved. Well, my guest today grew up in a difficult family environment, specifically in a strained relationship with her father, and as a teenager she made a decision to exclude him from her life. During the years that followed, she struggled with purpose worth, perfectionism and workaholism, but her journey also provided her with a helping of wisdom and valuable insight that she would eventually use to help other people. Today she's a keynote speaker and a podcast host, and she runs the Leon Foundation of Excellence, a program that helps youth heal intergenerational patterns of trauma. Her name is Catherine Lewis and it's my pleasure to have her as my guest on the show today. Welcome to Qualified, Katherine.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Great, me too. Thanks so much. Let's start off by talking about that relationship with your dad. Can you just tell us a little bit about the background and then what actually happened when you were 13 that prompted your decision to end your relationship with him?

My dad is an incredible man and he's also a human, which means that we all are broken. We all have imperfections, and he had those too. When I was young, he had a lot of stress, a lot of things that he was dealing with, as most of us adults do, and when things got too stressful, he would handle it in different ways that were traumatic for me, and I had some kind of unique sense of emotional intelligence as a child, to where I could see that he had an alternative option, that he didn't have to respond to me in that way. But it was a matter of him working on himself and making a different choice, gaining skills and tools that could help him manage his own frustration and stress and respond to me differently. And so I would go to him and I would say, hey, can you do this? It hurts me when you do that, and I'd ask him to change. And we'd have this sorrowful moment when we would come together and he would empathize, he would understand, of course he doesn't want to hurt me, and then the behavior would continue, because change is often hard and it takes time, especially if you don't have the right tools or if you've had decades of programming that has really affected and habituated the way that you respond to life, and so, when I was 13, I had reached my limit. I was a little bit over continuing to ask and not seeing that change, and so I asked him, when my parents divorced, to remove himself from my life, and so I lived with my mom and we didn't see each other for the next 13 years.

That was incredibly insightful for you as a young person to have those boundaries and to take a stand for your own mental health and say, hey, that's not healthy, I don't want to be treated that way. So good for you, and I can imagine that some of his behavior probably contributed to the problems and in his relationship with your mom, that may or may not have been the case, but how did your mom react to your decision?

She was okay with the decision and, I would imagine, because they had decided to split up, that that increased the support. They had their own struggles, they had things that they were working through, and nowadays I can say that they're good friends and that's a beautiful thing. They've both grown immensely. At the time, there was this depiction of my dad as being the bad guy, and so she was in agreement with me in terms of saying that his behavior needed to change, so there wasn't a lot of resistance to my decision.

Yeah, well, let's talk about that time. You make this hard decision and then you're moving forward at age 13, without your father and your life. Now what did your life look like, and did you feel like things instantly got better, or did you trade one hard thing for another?

I would say that it was a mix. So it's definitely hard to live your life without a parent, a mother, a father, a guardian who might have raised you and then passes away. Whatever the situation is, loss is difficult, and so it was hard, as someone who's growing into a young woman, to not have my father at my sporting events to guide me. When I was struggling academically, socially, with relationships, with just becoming a young woman, I needed my dad's guidance, and so there was a big piece of loss there, but I don't think I knew it at the time, because I was coming from this perspective of I've already asked you for the more that I want from you, and you haven't given it to me, and so I'm going to harden my heart a little bit and just say that's fine, I can do it on my own, I'll figure this out. And so I got this roughened attitude of misindependence and I'll be my own superhero, I can figure it out. And so I don't know that at the time I really understood how much I missed what I was missing out on, and instead it was full bore, diving deep into becoming a workaholic. I'm going to be perfect in terms of my grades and how I'm doing in school, I'm going to engage in clubs, I'm going to do sports, I'm going to try and perform at my peak as much as possible across every aspect of life. And this was a pattern that then was perpetuated for the next 15 years, I would say, and really helped develop to who I am. There's beauty in it, but there's also a lot of things that I look back on and think well, it would have been nice to have been softer. It would have been nice to have not been so extreme in my desire for perfectionism and for accomplishment and success in work.

Yeah, I mean as an outside observer. It sounds like you went through a mourning period with the loss of your dad, but it seems like you quickly kind of got to this place of radical acceptance and then changed your life as a result of it, and that's difficult to do, so let's talk about then what happened next. I mean, how did this relationship somehow get mended?

When I was in early, early 20s maybe 2021, I tried to rebuild that relationship with him and him with me, and there was a summer in which I stayed at his place I was doing an internship near where he lived and we tried to reconcile and there just was a ton of hurt still. It was still pretty difficult and I decided again to just back off, and so I wasn't ready yet. We weren't in a place where I could accept the way that he is, that I had enough tools to handle situations appropriately not to say that I was handling them inappropriately, but just in a way to where it really was healing and beautiful. We had a lot of betrayal and a lot of trauma between us. Fast forward a few years and I remember preparing for Teach for America, which is a program that I went through, and I was on ASU's campus over the summer teaching middle school students. But I also had a decent amount of free time and I would do a ton of journaling, a lot of prayer, and I came to this place where I was sitting on this bench on the campus it was super hot and sunny outside and this bird came and it was singing its song and it sat down right next to me and in that moment, this peace was just brought upon me and I felt completely okay and this complete surrendering, this release, with the animosity between my dad and I I just completely was able to surrender it. My heart felt healed and I was able to say, yeah, I forgive you. And I called him in that moment and I was. You know, there were definitely tears, I was crying a bit and I told him. I said, dad, I love you so much and I forgive you for everything. And that was a huge step towards us healing. And, of course, he forgave me as well, and maybe it's not an of course statement. He could have been better, he could have been resentful, but, like I said, he's an incredible person and forgave me. And from there we were able to start building back our relationship. There are certain boundaries that we had to have in place, certain things that we had to be aware of in terms of how do we communicate with each other and where people actually coming from different ways that we had to mature. But it's been three years now that we have had our relationship restored and it's been absolutely beautiful. So we separated when I was 13, came back together 13 years later and now have had three years of an incredible relationship and, you know, even a quick anecdotal demonstration of that is now having my dad take me on. Daddy daughter dates and you're never too old for that, and so it's just great to spend time with him in that way and we talk all the time. So there's this complete restoration of memory that we didn't get to have and his guidance, which I missed out on as a young woman.

Wow. Well, I love the story of the bird and I can relate to that. I think in so many other stories of loss that people have shared on this show, people have talked about seeing birds or sunsets or beautiful moments of peace that just kind of affirms in their heart a step they should take or that a loved one is OK. So I understand what that means. I also think it was incredibly ordained that you knew at that moment that you should ask for forgiveness and that his heart was at a soft enough place to forgive you in return, because you were quite vulnerable at that time. He could have shut you down. So it does seem like the time was right and you said that you prayed beforehand and when you felt that moment. So can you talk a little bit about that? What role did your faith have in that whole process?

At that time, I had a strong relationship with God, but I will clarify and say it wasn't God of the Bible and God of Jesus Christ, it was just this general God. I grew up, new age, and so it was a divine love, spirit, universe, whatever you want to call it, but we still had this relationship, and ultimately it was God. That wasn't my frame of reference, but we had this relationship, and I have always prayed. I've always turned to God for guidance, and so prayer and God Himself have played a big role. It's only within this past year that I myself have become a Christian, but, yes, jesus Christ has completely changed my life. He wasn't in my life, or I hadn't accepted Him into my life.

At that point in time, though, Well, God certainly knew what he was doing and he was working things out and loving on you even before you had given your life to Him. So, Katherine, thanks for sharing all about your relationship with your father and how things finally turned out the way they did, which is so good. But for someone listening who's currently struggling in a strained relationship with a parent, what words of encouragement do you have to offer based on your experience?

There are several things that I could say. Number one and it's easy for me to say this where I'm at now but there is nothing worse than living life without our parents. Some of us don't have that choice, but some of us do. And when we have that choice, for me, I want to do everything I can to value and cherish and make the most of those relationships. And that was my intent in terms of that healing journey that I went on and I was not going to go through my life not having a relationship with my dad. I buckled down and did everything I could to heal stuff within me, to feel all the anger, all the hurt, and restore that. And so, first and foremost is no matter what pain you've been through, know that they absolutely love you. Like there is no parent who fundamentally does not love their child and want the best for them. They have the skills and the tools to demonstrate that in the way that makes sense to you, in the way that you prefer, even in a way that is healthy, but fundamentally, that is the truth. Then from there we can start working on ourselves and say, okay, well, does this matter to me? And of course the answer is probably yes, but it's still a good question to ask, and then from there we can do the work that we need to forgive. Now I will say for my own journey, there was a period of probably 10 years where I was very angry, I was very bitter. When I was younger, I didn't cuss, but I would write curse words in the carpet with my feet, you know, because I was just so mad or I'd hit a pillow or something like that. It's fine for those feelings to be there. We just can't live in them, like, do what it takes to move through them and to heal, because then you can start to forgive, and forgiveness is something that's important to recognize. It's not about forgetting. So I still had to know that there are certain boundaries I need to have in place so we have a healthy relationship. I'm not just completely forgetting the way that we work together, but you forgive everything. And I will say now, becoming a Christian like Jesus Christ does make it even easier to forgive when you understand the forgiveness that he's giving you all the time, unconditionally, before you're even born, and so that's a huge piece of reconciliation. The last thing I'll say is it does take two, and so you may be in a situation where you say, well, I really want to restore that relationship, but they're just not ready, and for me, the best answer is prayer, pray continuously that they can have a softening of heart, that they can forgive, that they can heal within themselves. They may not be willing to restore, not because they don't love you, but because they can't forgive themselves for what they did. You never know what's going on, and so I'll just say that prayer is powerful. I had someone pray for 17 years that I would come to know the Lord, and they never gave up, and I'm so, so grateful. And so it could take some time, but know that this matters and be willing to pray.

Really good. Thank you for that, Katherine. Well, I talked about your foundation, the Leon Foundation, and the opening, and I mentioned that you used what you went through to help other people and you continue to do it. Can you just give us a little snapshot of what that foundation does and what you do in it?

Absolutely. When I was a teenager, I had already separated from my dad and I resorted to reading a lot of books, going to therapy, finding mentors. I had family members who came around me to support me. It really was a village to get me through that period in life, and I recognized that when I did have a little bit of insight into life as a child I don't know where it came from, I just knew that I had it, and I also had a ton of resources around me that I recognized other people may not have access to. I had the ability to read all of these books, go to these therapy sessions, things that a lot of people don't get to do for various reasons and so I wanted to culminate everything that I had learned and turn it into a program where I could help students who were going through similar things. We all go through trauma, sometimes it's really big, sometimes it's just those micro traumas of arguments and fighting or divorce, which can also be a huge trauma, depending. But I wanted a community where people could come together, we could have fun, we could start that journey of self-awareness, discovering our own patterns, things that we needed to heal, and then gain those tools that I felt like my dad was missing, and you know many of us are, but it would have been helpful if you had them. How do we communicate effectively? How do we take a second and say, wow, I'm really angry right now and it's because this thing happened earlier in the day that I couldn't control, but it's threatening my position at work and whether or not I'll get a promotion, and I'm so sorry that I'm taking it out on you or whatever the case may be, but just those seemingly simple things that actually make a really big difference in the quality of our relationships. I wanted students to learn those things before they were making decisions about their future relationships, their career, that they could heal those cycles of trauma within their own families before they left home. And so it's been eight years now that we've been working with students all across really the world. It's kind of incredible. So we're locally focused in Denver, colorado, but during the pandemic we had the opportunity to work with 50 students from across the United States and four other countries, and I just felt so blessed to be able to meet these people, get insight into their own journeys, and we have seen some incredible healing happen through these programs.

Well. Congratulations on your success. I think what you're doing with young people is so important, and I love that you're using your experience to help other people. So, catherine, I loved listening to your story and hearing all the valuable information you had to share with us. You talked about the hard stuff of family relationships and you expressed the way you felt when interactions with your father weren't healthy. You told us that you asked your dad to change the way he responded to you, and when he didn't, you put boundaries in place. You acknowledged that, even though you stood your ground and you made the hard decision to walk away from each other, you experienced great loss without your father's presence in your life. You shared about how your adult life was impacted by the absence of your dad, and you took steps to reconcile. On a few separate occasions, you brought up some important points for us to ponder about our relationships, and then you offered up your experience with forgiveness and how important it is to release our negative feelings in order to move forward in a healthy way, and you also reminded us about the power of prayer and how we can pray for those who hurt us to have a softening of their hearts. Katherine, what other lessons have you learned through all your experiences? Can you share with someone listening who needs help right now?

There are three things that I'll share. Number one is to have gratitude for those who are with you now. Do not take advantage, and this doesn't have to do with dramatic relationships, but just the people who are around you in this moment. It's such a pleasure. I mean even just the fact that you and I are talking. What are the chances? There are 8 billion people in this world and the fact that I ever in my own lifetime get to meet you is so incredible. It is such a privilege and I don't know how long it's going to last or if it will ever cross paths again. And so everyone that you come in contact with, it's a blessing. If it's just the person at the grocery store, don't miss those opportunities to see the beauty and to value those interactions. I just think it's fantastic when we can take a second and be intentional in that. The other piece is to forgive quickly. Life is so, so messy and it's not going to be the perfect story that we're seeing on social media or in the movies. It just isn't for any of us. I don't care how wealthy you are, how beautiful you are, how educated you are. It's still a mess, but it's okay. The difference is we have to forgive and let things go and be willing to accept whatever's happening to us in the moment, rather than trying to resist and control and make things work out a certain way, and when we don't forgive, we're still in that state of pride and control. Instead, we need to humble ourselves and just be quick to forgive. Now I do want to say that that doesn't necessarily mean you have to stay in situations that are dangerous or abusive. Be safe, have good boundaries, but still forgive everyone. The last piece of that is again just kind of coming back to that intentionality. So we don't know when we're going to lose each other. Be intentional in having quality time with folks. Ask deep questions what's going on in your day? Drill down into that. How do you like to be loved If we could just do anything for a day? What would you want to do and then actually make time in your schedule to do that? I know I received feedback that I tend to schedule people in and it's because I have so much going on, but friends and family have told me hey, when you invite me to something, it feels like you're already doing this and you just want me to come along. If it works for me. What if you came to me and said, hey, what do you want to do? And whatever it is, whenever it is like, let's go do it. And it was that small little shift and that piece of feedback that I received that has changed relationships, just having that quality time. So here's a bonus one is be willing to take feedback from folks, because that will increase the quality of the time that you have with them and your relationships. And again, all of this comes back to we don't know when we're going to lose each other, we don't know when we're going to go, and so let's value the time that we have now.

Well, thank you for those really good tips, and I can appreciate the time factor. We don't know when we're going to lose people and we talk about that on every episode, and so expressing gratitude, forgiveness, being intentional, no small talk, going deep and really appreciating people, I agree with you 100%. I'm a fan. So, Katherine, thank you so much. I am going to put a link to your website in the show notes so that people can learn about the foundation and everything else that you do. Is there anything else that you want to add in that? I failed to ask you.

I just want to say thank you so much for this time. With everything that we were talking about, I think this conversation is super important. If anyone is nervous about initiating these conversations, trying to restore these relationships, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I know that that will be linked in the show notes below, but I'm happy to jump on a call with anyone and if we need to run through tips, if we need to just have a chat, if you just need an accountability to reach out to that person and restore that relationship or walk through forgiveness, I'm happy to be there for anyone because this matters so, so much. So please feel free to send me a chat.

Oh, I love it. Okay, stand by for my phone call, okay. Okay, all right, Katherine. Well, it's been a pleasure meeting you and getting to know you, and I hope our paths do cross again, okay.

Me too. Thank you for having me.

So, for those of you listening, if you can relate to Katherine's story, it's not too late to make a change. Bitterness and resentment can take its toll on us emotionally and physically, and taking steps to embrace forgiveness can do wonders for the soul. And while it's so important not to return to a toxic relationship, it is possible to have the peace that comes with bringing God into the matter, whether it leads to a reconciliation and healthy change, like it did for Katherine, or if it's just a matter of you working it out with God to let go of the anger so you can enjoy a life of freedom. I pray that would begin for you today. Thanks for listening.