Forgiving My Father and Setting Boundaries With My Mother

Do I forgive my father? Yes, but not the way most people expect, and not on a schedule. It came in 2017, on a night after my daughter had been put in timeout and I was flooded with anger toward a man who had been gone for years. I told him exactly what I thought of how he raised me. In a quiet moment between waves of rage, I heard him ask, "Would you like to understand?" I said yes. What I was shown afterward, his childhood, his years at the racetrack and in Vietnam, and the self-hatred that followed him home, changed how I carry my past. It did not excuse what he did to me. It let me see him as a deeply damaged man who gave me more than he had ever received. I tell that whole story in How I Finally Came to Forgive My Father.

Forgiving a parent and letting that parent back into your daily life are two separate decisions, and my mother is where I learned the difference. I love her, but I love her from a distance. In my May 2024 post on setting boundaries with her, I explain why. For years I talked to her almost every day, moved her next door, and tried to fill the space my father left. Again and again I ran into the same wall: her medications, her illness, and a refusal to hear anything I had to say about her health. So I told her clearly that I would not have a relationship with her until she was sober and clean, and I have kept that line. Holding it does not mean I stopped caring. It means I am not willing to take the edge off her choices every single day.

The thread running through all of this goes back to the worst years of my drinking. When I hit bottom, my father was the person I could call. In my memoir excerpt about the lowest night of my drinking, he told me I was going to be okay, and then he drove over and stayed with me for a while. Earlier, he and my mother had made it clear they would not move near me until I quit drinking. That was a boundary too, and it was a loving one. Neither of them was willing to help me keep drinking, and that refusal is part of why I am sober now.

The first time I put this idea into writing was in my October 2022 post on forgiving a parent who disowned you. That post used my mother's story. Her parents cut her off after she chose my father, and I told her that the rupture was part of why our family got the adventurous life we had. I still think finding gratitude in a broken relationship is a useful way to look at a tragedy. But the post also makes a point I want to repeat: forgiveness and boundaries can live side by side. You can be grateful for what grew out of a rupture and still hold a line about how you are treated going forward.

My 2026 memoir excerpts fill in the years between those posts. In Yoga, Family Trips, and Bringing My Mom Closer, I describe how I found my mother a house near us, how she moved, and how my son asked her a simple question about why she still lived in Mississippi. That period is the closeness the 2024 post looks back on. Seeing it written out in order helped me understand why stepping back has been so hard, and why I still believe it was the right move for both of us.

So here is my view, stated plainly. I have forgiven my father. I love my mother from a distance. I think both of those can be true at once. Forgiveness is about what I carry inside me, and boundaries are about what I let into my daily life. Below this opening you will find the contents, then each of the five posts in full, newest first. If the anger is what you are stuck on, start with the story about my father. If you need a practical line to hold with a parent who keeps pulling you back, read the 2024 post on boundaries. For the wider context of my drinking years, my Alcoholics Anonymous hub and drinking story hub cover the rest.

Yoga, Family Trips, and Bringing My Mom Closer

Originally published June 21, 2026.

This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.

After those streams, I would be completely aggravated. I carried that agitation into my life at home. I was less present with the kids. I was irritable with my ex-wife. My business and my moods became completely entangled. When things were going well, I had a massive ego and became insufferable about how right and brilliant I thought I was. When things were not going well, I sank into depression and sadness. My ex-wife got tired of the mood swings. She got tired of how everything revolved around whether my business was up or down.

In the middle of all of this, I started getting deeply into yoga. I had done some yoga in 2021 with a friend of mine who taught yoga outdoors and ran workout classes as well. I was doing yoga a couple of times a week back then. Eventually, he went to teach at my yoga studio. I had sworn I would never go back there after my first visit, when they had started requiring masks in 2020, but he convinced me to give it another shot. In 2022, I started doing yoga there very consistently. I loved how my body felt. Yoga felt like it was releasing old tension, loosening things that had been locked up for years, helping me become flexible again. After reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Body and books like Mind Over Medicine, I started to recognize just how tense my body usually was. Hours of playing video games, standing in place, talking into a microphone, yelling, getting hyped, all of it kept my body wound tight.

There was one day when my body was so tense that I pulled a calf muscle just walking around the house. I heard a loud snap and collapsed. I felt like I had been shot in the calf. I heard the snap, fell down, and thought, what the fuck was that. I did not go to the doctor or the hospital. I assumed it would heal on its own, and eventually, it did. I realized I needed to loosen my body up. I needed to become more flexible physically, and I started to see that a lot of the pain and suffering I was experiencing in life was connected to how rigid my mind had become. When your mind is rigid, you cannot even see flexibility as an option. I could see it clearly in my body, though. My body was stiff, locked up, and tense, so I decided to start with that. I got into yoga with the specific intention of making my body more flexible, and it worked. As my body softened, my mind did too. Yoga ended up being one of the most important tools I had for surviving the mental strain of that period, especially the hatred, the public judgment, and the feeling that my ex-wife, her family, and even some of my friends were turning against me while my business was collapsing at the same time.

When I went through the Udemy situation years earlier, I did not have yoga. I spun out much harder back then. I was more irritable, more reactive, more ungrounded. Yoga helped me stay calm and embodied. It helped me remain flexible, not just physically but mentally, so I could keep trying new business ideas without sinking into constant suffering. I got an unlimited membership at my yoga studio and started going consistently, anywhere from three to seven classes a week. Most of the time, I went to the power flow classes. I met people there, made friends, and genuinely loved being part of that environment. It became one of the few places where I felt stable and supported during a time when so much else felt chaotic. If you are craving that kind of steady, supportive environment while your own life feels chaotic, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we can look at how to build some of that stability into your own life on our call.

At the same time, I was still enjoying trips with the family. In 2022, we went to Legoland for the first time. I had terrible diarrhea during that trip, but I refused to stay home. Instead, I put myself on a liquid diet and drank Powerade all day. I had tons of energy, the diarrhea stopped, and we ended up having a great time. I remember thinking how simple and effective that solution was, at least in my experience. What worked for me was to stop eating solid food for a bit and let my digestive system recover. I was genuinely happy about how well that worked.

Later in 2022, in the fall, we went to Michigan to see my family for the first time in a few years and brought the kids with us. That trip was emotionally intense. My ex-wife and I got into several fights while we were there, including name calling and a couple of days filled with heavy tension. There was a lot coming up for me emotionally, seeing my family again after such a long time. I was already spun out about my work, and travel tends to amplify that for me ironically because of letting go. We eventually smoothed things over after a few days, but it was a bumpy ride. The marriage issues were no longer subtle at that point. They were continuing to escalate.

One thing that stood out to me on that Michigan trip was a memory from years earlier. During the hurricane evacuation in 2017, it had taken us around sixteen hours to drive from St. Petersburg to Auburn, Alabama. I remembered thinking back then that the next time there was a hurricane, I wanted to already be out of town. While we were in Michigan in 2022, a hurricane started heading toward St. Petersburg. I remembered that old thought and realized this was exactly what I had wanted. We were already gone. We decided to extend our vacation instead of rushing back. After the hurricane passed, we drove back to Florida instead of flying.

Looking back, extending the trip probably was not necessary, but it worked out in an oddly perfect way. Tampa was so short on rental cars after the hurricane that they were desperate to get vehicles driven back into Florida. We had rented a minivan in Michigan for three days, and they let us keep it for almost another week and drive it all the way back to Florida for essentially no additional cost. They needed the inventory that badly. It felt like one of those strange moments where circumstances aligned in our favor, even in the middle of everything else that felt unstable.

Overall, we ended up having a really nice time. My family was not able to see me as much as I might have hoped because it was the middle of the school year and everyone was busy, but we enjoyed traveling around Michigan and visiting different places together. On the drive back, we stopped in Indianapolis, which I have to say I still cannot stand. I did not like it when I was there in 2010 visiting that girl from high school, and I did not like it this time either. Indianapolis just feels gross to me. That said, they do have an excellent children’s museum, and that part of the stop was genuinely fun. The kids loved it, and it was worth the detour just for that.

After Indianapolis, we continued the drive south and ended up getting a flat tire in Chattanooga. It was late Friday afternoon, around five o’clock, and we limped into a Walmart. I went inside and talked to the tire guys, explained that we were on a long trip, had the kids with us, and really needed help getting back on the road. I leaned into being polite and earnest, and it worked. Even at five p.m. on a Friday, they replaced the tire with a new one. That small act of kindness made the difference between us being stranded and us getting home safely. We were able to drive the rest of the way back the next day without any more issues.

Considering how tense things had been between my ex-wife and me at the beginning of the trip, the rest of it went relatively smoothly. Not long after that, we took another trip to Legoland. This time, I was able to eat normally and actually enjoy the food at the restaurants, which felt like a small but meaningful victory after the last visit. It was one of those moments where everything felt simple and pleasant again, even if only briefly.

Just before the hurricane evacuation trip, I helped my mom in a much bigger way. She had really wanted a dog. She had already bought an absurdly expensive trained Belgian Malinois, which turned out to be a disaster. The dog had far too much energy for her, they did not bond well, and she eventually gave the dog away. By the middle of 2022, she was desperate for another dog and was talking about draining the rest of her financial reserves to get one. When my dad died, she had a real cushion of savings. By this point, she had already burned through a huge share of it, largely because of the first dog, even though she does receive a solid retirement income.

One night on the phone, it finally clicked for me. She was not being irresponsible or impulsive in some abstract way. She was lonely. She was grieving the loss of her previous dog, and the failure of the expensive replacement had left her even more desperate for companionship. Instead of letting her spend the rest of her money, I started looking for another option. I found a dog in Miami that was up for adoption, a massive dog, well over a hundred pounds. The listing photo showed him sitting awkwardly on someone’s bed, looking both gentle and ridiculous at the same time. My mom immediately loved him.

I drove down to Miami to pick the dog up, then drove him all the way from Miami to her small town in Mississippi to deliver him to my mom. She was incredibly grateful. The dog fit perfectly into her life. They bonded immediately. She trained him, took care of him, and everything worked out exactly the way the first situation had not. She still has him to this day. His name is Scooby, and he genuinely changed her life.

That experience opened something up for her. When we visited again in the summer of 2022, my son asked her a simple question. He said, Grandma, why do you live in Mississippi? It was an ordinary, innocent question, but it landed hard. My mom had been living in Mississippi since 2005, and in that moment she realized she did not actually have a good reason to stay there anymore. Her grandkids were growing up fast. At that point, my son was four and my daughter was seven. Time was moving quickly, and the window to be present in their lives was not going to stay open forever. By then, my ex-wife and I were already making trips to Mississippi twice a year, once in the summer and once in the winter. The pattern was clear. The distance was becoming harder to justify, especially as the kids got older. That realization planted a seed that would quietly shape what came next, even if none of us fully understood it at the time. If you are weighing a big family decision like bringing a parent closer or being more present before a window quietly closes, I am happy to think it through with you when you schedule a private call with me.

Then, after years of me casually and not so casually telling my mom that she should move near us, something finally shifted. One day she told me, almost out of nowhere, that she wanted me to find her a house near us to buy. I remember thinking, holy shit, really? Within a day, I found her a house right near us for sale. She bought it without ever seeing it in person. By October, right after our hurricane evacuation trip, she was ready to move. I had a plane ticket booked to fly to Mississippi to help make it happen.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Forgiving My Father and Setting Boundaries With My Mother

Originally published June 21, 2026.

Yoga, Family Trips, and Bringing My Mom Closer

Originally published June 21, 2026.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I Finally Set Boundaries with My Mother

From my video published May 12, 2024.

I've finally set boundaries with my mother, and if you're struggling with setting boundaries with a family member, I hope this experience will be helpful for you, because this has been a big challenge for me. I've even been hesitant to add this chapter to my autobiography. But it's Mother's Day today, and I'm not seeing my mother, so this seems like the time to talk about it in detail.

To begin: I love my mother. And the easiest way I've found to love my mother is to love her from a distance. Currently that distance is across the street. My mother lives 100 yards away from me, because a year and a half ago I dropped everything for a week and helped her move next door to me, along with the moving company. Then, for over a year, I saw her almost every day, and I did everything I could to help her move and to be a great son, to help her out, to fill the space that was left when my dad died.

And now I'm in a place where I don't see my mother and I don't talk to my mother. If I run into her on the street, I'll say hi, give her a hug, tell her I love her, but I'm not going to voluntarily see her, even on Mother's Day. Why? Because it's easier to love my mother from a distance.

Why I love my mother from a distance

When I'm up close to my mother, this is my experience of her. My mother is a drug addict who lives alone in her house, and who is, I guess the word is, a narcissist, so she pretty much just thinks about herself and her past and her issues all the time. She is very qualified for Al-Anon, because she has alcoholism in her parents, in my father, and in me. She very much lived a life surrounded by alcohol, by alcoholics. My father got sober when I was six years old, so for the first seven or eight years of their relationship he was an active alcoholic. When they met, he was also a drug addict, a sex addict, and a gambler, and he cleaned up a lot. But it was challenging growing up in our house at times, as it is for many people.

My mom got into a position where she was having a really rough time psychologically. All of us felt it. My dad nearly left about 25 years ago; he nearly took us and left. My mother went into the military when I was a baby, because my father had been kicked out of his own house in Michigan in the winter because of his addiction, and my mother went into the Army because she saw that as the best way she could find to guarantee that I would be taken care of. For that, I will forever be grateful.

The challenge is that being in the Army put my mother in a position where the institution has always just pushed forward. Take some drugs, get some surgery, whatever you can do, but you've got to do your PT test, you've got to be there and show up all the time. You do your job, you do what you're ordered to do, and if you're struggling with that, get some drugs, get some surgery, and get back into action. My mother had lots of surgeries and all kinds of different drug treatments, and she finally got on opiates a little less than 25 years ago. She's been on them ever since. She takes, according to the doctors, cancer-patient levels of morphine, among many, many other drugs.

The years I called her almost every day

My wife said that since she's known me, which is since 2011, I've had trouble setting boundaries with my mother. And my mother was a big help to me when I first got sober. After my dad died, I was in acute pain, and drinking was pushing me to the point where my wife finally couldn't stand it anymore and was getting ready to leave me. She made that clear. That's what motivated me to get sober, because I realized I'm not going to do very well, to say the least, if my wife leaves. I've got to do better in my life.

So when I got sober 10 years ago, I got all fired up that I could help my mom, share what I learned with her, and help her get clean and change her life too. About two years into my sobriety, she and I really had it out. She tried for a couple of days to get off all the drugs she's on, and she couldn't do it. It was ugly. She was nasty to me on every phone call because I was telling her she was a drug addict and that she needed to go to rehab and get off this stuff. We took a month where we didn't speak. Then she apologized and said she wanted to have a relationship with me again, and she made it clear: don't tell me to get off these drugs, my doctor gives me these, and that's not okay with me.

So from 2016 to the beginning of 2024, I called my mother almost every day. I did whatever I could do and gave whatever I could give as a son. I talked to her on average probably 20 or 30 minutes a day, every day. Some days I talked to her for hours; other days, no call, or a quick five-minute call. I even got my wife to drive to Mississippi with our two young children, because my mother said she was too sick to visit, and we had been years without seeing her. My wife really did not want to drive 11 hours with our one-year-old son and four-year-old daughter to go to Starkville, Mississippi, but I demanded it after realizing that if we didn't go visit my mother in 2019, I was never going to see her again. She was just going to die there.

So I did everything I could to try to help my mother, and I respected her choices about her health. That culminated, after several visits to see her, in her moving next door to me. For a bit over a year, I showed up almost every day. We had lots of nice adventures. We went to the commissary and the base exchange on MacDill. I took her to movies. I took her to some Al-Anon meetings and included her in things with my wife's family. We had lots of good days. But there would always come this point where she would be having a rough day, and she wouldn't want any help with it. She would just want to feel bad and wallow in it.

The negative feedback loop I wasn't allowed to mention

I wasn't allowed to say things like, hey mom, why don't you get off some of these drugs? These drugs are putting you in a negative feedback cycle where you're stuck. You take the drugs because you feel bad, but then you keep feeling bad because you're taking all these drugs.

And I'm a person who, in my experience, has become very healthy. My body has been incredibly healthy. I've not had one day in the last year where I've been sick. To be clear, I've had symptoms here and there. I have a little sensation in my throat right now, and my voice is a little different than usual. But not one day in the last year have I been sick in the sense of having to lie in bed with a whole collection of symptoms and a story to go with it. I have individual symptoms here and there, but my body has been able to function wonderfully every day, to do everything needed, to show up, to go to yoga, to go to my meetings, to take care of things around the house. I generally don't have any symptoms at all. In my experience, I'm the healthiest I've ever been right now.

So my mother being chronically ill and always talking about how sick she is, and then, from my point of view, doing nothing to change that, wore on me. No matter what we would do on a day-to-day basis, there would always be this time where we'd have to talk about her mental and physical health, all these medications she's taking, the way she's treating her body. It got to be unbearable to me to see her choose to suffer, day after day after day, to never take any of my advice, and then to completely discount everything I've done in my own life.

The breaking point, and the broken hip

The last time I went over to see her and spend time with her, it was 10 years since my dad had died. She laid into me that I don't have any medical experience, I don't know anything, I don't understand her problems. And I thought, I'm done. I'm done with this relationship. I didn't talk to her for five days, which was the longest I hadn't talked to her in years.

At which point she broke her hip, which to me looked very intentional, perhaps on a subconscious level. Like, oh, you're not going to talk to me? I'm going to show you. I'm going to break my hip, and now you'll have to take care of me, you'll have to do all this stuff. My wife got involved and went over to drive her to the hospital, and my wife asked if I would carry my mother into the car for her. I said, because it's you and you've asked, and because you've gotten yourself into this, I will assist you, although my opinion is that you have a broken hip and you should call an ambulance. They are perfectly equipped to help you, and you have health care for that. But my wife and my mother disagreed and asked for my help, and I said yes. I gave my mother a hug and I said, I love you and good luck. I said almost nothing else.

After that, I didn't see her. I maybe responded to one text message she sent. I refused to see her or to do anything else. Everybody called and asked, and I said, no, I'm done with this relationship with my mother until she becomes the person I know she's capable of being. I at first did this purely in anger. I can't believe she's living her life this way. All I've done, and it's never enough. All that stuff. But then I managed to transform it back into love, and to remember that some of the best help I got in my life was when people gave me tough love.

The tough love that saved my own life

If my wife had kept putting up with my drinking, I don't know if I'd be sober or alive today. As long as she kept staying with me when I drank, and she saw how I drank, I saw no big motivation to change. I tried to get sober a few times, but I just did not have the fire in me to do the necessary steps, to go through the necessary discomfort, and to face my life. I got that fire when my wife was ready to leave. Her finally setting that boundary with me, telling me, I'm not going to be with you if you drink, that motivated me to do anything, which included Alcoholics Anonymous and a lot of other steps I've detailed in many of my stories. That tough love motivated me to take action.

What I see today is that if I have a relationship with my mother while she's still in her drug addiction, and she has lots of other addictions, like a shopping addiction where she buys all these things and her house turned into a hoarder situation, then I'm doing the same thing my wife wisely refused to do for me. That hoarding has been addressed a little bit, but she just sits inside all day and doesn't do anything to help anyone else, at least last I saw.

Why I can picture her thriving

Now, what I'm able to do, since I don't see my mother, is picture that she's thriving. Because I don't see her, and I don't see any other evidence of her life, I'm able to think of her as doing fantastic, changing, and being different than I remember. As long as I don't see her, there's no evidence to contradict that.

My wife is over at her house right now with the kids, because my wife is a woman of moderation who can move between people with drastically different viewpoints, who can have healthy boundaries, and who can say, hey, I'll bring the kids over to see you, but no, I'm not going to drive you to the hospital again. With me, I'm afraid to go over and see my mother today, because I know where it leads.

I've noticed that since I set firm boundaries with my mother, things have shifted. I made it clear in a text message. I said, I will not have a relationship with you until you are sober and clean. She doesn't drink, but I mean no drugs, the mind-altering ones most especially, because she's never clean. She's always on the drugs. I said, I will not see you unless you're off these drugs and you're working some kind of program of recovery, not just sitting in your house all day alone watching what she calls justified-violence movies. I'm willing to change this perspective if I can see there's a way to have a relationship with my mother where we can communicate, because right now I'm not able to communicate with her. Her life, last I observed it, is completely unacceptable to me.

No one in active addiction can be in my inner circle

No one in my life that I keep close is allowed to be an active alcoholic, a drug addict, or a self-obsessed, narcissistic, sick person. If that describes you, you can't be in my inner circle. I can't be seeing you, because that rubs off on me, and it shows that I, as a person with 10 years sober who is as emotionally stable as I've ever been, am okay with that. And I'm not okay with that. If you want to be in my life, you need to be a grounded, balanced, healthy, sane, sober person. There's no flexibility on that.

Now, I can call people on the phone once a week and have friends who drink, and family members and so on, but I'm not going to come visit you, I'm not going to spend meaningful amounts of time with you, and I'm not going to put myself in a situation where I have to have any meaningful interaction beyond a little phone conversation with you. If you want to share your own story about this with me, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll talk it through on a weekly call.

The massage therapist who opened the door

I even had a massage therapist at the same time who was in the middle of her active alcoholism, and I cut her off too. Ironically, this was the gateway to setting boundaries with my mother. This massage therapist, who I was close friends with and had known for years, I was seeing once a week for a massage, so I'd be at her place about two hours total, since a massage is 90 minutes. Even though she wasn't drinking when I was over there, she was in the middle of that active-alcoholic thinking: drama-filled, emotionally unstable, and then it's everybody else's fault. All the drama in her life, it's her sister, it's her husband, it's her boyfriend. It's always somebody else, and it's sick.

She messaged me asking, why aren't you scheduling massages with me anymore? And I said, when you get sober and work a program of recovery, I would love to see you again. She didn't respond to that, understandably, because I'd talked to her one day and told her, you're an alcoholic, and there's only one solution for an alcoholic that's going to give you a good life, and that's to stop drinking. She didn't want to hear that, of course.

What my mother told me to do, and what I asked her back

I told my mother about that situation before I sent the message. I said, what should I do about my massage therapist friend? I go over there and she's just a disaster, and I feel worse after I leave. And she said, you should tell her how much she's hurting you. So I said, then what should I do with you, Mom? Should I tell you how much you're hurting me, watching you be sick all the time but do nothing about it? And she said, I'm going to the doctor. I said, going to the doctor is not doing anything to get yourself healthy.

I was very sick once, and I've worked to become the healthiest person I know. It takes work. It takes yoga classes. It takes thousands of AA meetings. It takes reading hundreds of books. It takes teaching yourself how to be your own advocate for your health, which I outlined in something I called Hope for Your Health Challenges. I've put a lot of work into being healthy, which my mother easily dismissed, all of it, because, well, you don't have any medical experience. She didn't want to listen to anything I had to say across the whole area of health.

I've had a life for a family that, the way my dad was living, we could have been on the streets easily. My mother helped my dad sober up and was a rock for him. She didn't drink herself, and she was a huge help to my dad having a second, third, fourth, fifth chance at life. And I've tried everything I could do to be loving, to save her, to teach her, to lead by example. The most loving thing I can see to do now is to give her space, so that if she wants to live how she's been living, she can do it away from me, out of my sight, and if she wants to live how I'm living, I'd be right there to assist her with it.

The hardest part is not moving the boundary

The challenge for me has been to not change the boundaries. Today, while my wife and kids were visiting my mother, I chose to clean the car, because they went to the beach and there's sand everywhere. As I was cleaning, I was thinking, you know, you could just go over there, give her a hug, say hi, I love you. You could do that. And yeah, I could do that, but what happens if I do? What happens is I'll be over there every day again. It'll just be a matter of time before I'm over there every day, trying to be everything for her, trying to fill in for my dad again, like I was doing for most of the last year and a half up until February. I'm not going to fill that space my dad held in her life. That's clear.

I think one of the most loving things you can do, if you have a relationship that's not working, is to back off and create space for a relationship to fill that void that will work. By me saying, look, I love my mother, and I can love her from a distance, that leaves a hole in her life that someone else could fill. As long as I'm there, it takes the edge off the need to fill it. My mind says, well, Jerry, your mother could have a nicer Mother's Day if she could see you. Yeah, she might be able to have a nicer Mother's Day. But sometimes the path of growth is not having someone else enable you by taking the edge off, by making it a little easier.

As long as my wife was willing to make my drinking a little easier by showing up and loving me the next day, after I had my binge the night before, and being there to help me feel better, I wasn't motivated. I didn't have enough pain to inspire the growth I needed. It was facing the prospect of my entire life ending at my own hands, if my wife left me and I was all alone, that did it. Picturing what would happen, the last time I drank, I woke up the next day realizing that if my wife leaves, that's it for me. The pain was so great that I was motivated to go to any lengths to get sober, which I had never been before. Other times when the pain was great, I'd call my father and he would help. I moved home with my parents after I blew my life up from drinking. Sometimes people not co-signing your BS anymore is one of the best ways you can be loved.

Picturing the relationship I actually want

So I love my mother with all my heart, and I'm picturing having a great relationship with her where she's healthier than she's ever been, where she's happy, where she's clean, where she has a meaningful life. Some of you might think that's unrealistic. What I've seen is that the fact that I'm here now was not realistic 10 years ago. I know that my mother 10 years from now could be unrecognizable from where she's been this year. To me, the best way I can see to help that happen is to give her space, to honor the boundaries I set with her. If I go over there and say hi and that I love her, it dishonors the boundaries I already set, because she's given me no indication that she's clean or that she's working a program of recovery.

I've made it very clear that anyone who wants a relationship with me has to be living a sober lifestyle. Either a normal person like my wife, who chooses to be sober but easily could have a drink, for most of our relationship she had a drink here or there and was sober 99-plus percent of the time, of sound mind and body almost all the time, or someone genuinely in recovery. Anyone in my life has to meet that criteria.

Why I have to get this right for my kids

I'm glad I've connected with so many people who've shared their stories. I really need to get this right with my mother, because I'm an alcoholic, and there's a decent chance that one of my children is an alcoholic or a drug addict also. I certainly hope not, but if I can't set boundaries like this with my mother, I'm in for a rough ride with the kids.

I have much more respect and understanding now for people like my father's family. You hear things like, oh yeah, his family kicked him out at Christmas in 1984, in the winter in Michigan, and it's cold, and they knew he didn't have anywhere to go. They kicked him out of the house anyway. Why? Because his drunken behavior was so unacceptable that he was ruining everyone else's Christmas season. Some people die in that situation. My father eventually chose to get sober. I look at it now as: setting healthy boundaries with my mother is the best way to give her the chance to change, because if I go back on them, it's not going to be good for either of us. If you're working through forgiving a parent yourself, I've shared more about that side of it in how to forgive a parent who disowned you.

The emotional stability I found by stepping back

I've found that since stepping back and giving my mother space, I've never been this emotionally stable before, and it's been wonderful. I feel absolutely in the zone in my life. The things I've tried to do in my business, like focus on making music, having fun gaming, feeling like I have enough, making evergreen videos, really honoring myself, and showing up for my family, it's all come together. Stepping back from the emotional instability of my mother has helped me become emotionally stable, as has letting go of those two hours a week with the alcoholic massage therapist.

That was about 10 hours a week, at least, that I was spending one-on-one with people in the middle of their addiction. Out of 160 hours in a week, minus the 60 or so I sleep, eight-plus hours a night, seven days a week, I have about 100 waking hours a week, and I was literally spending 10 percent of that time one-on-one with people in the middle of their addiction. A lot of my creative life since then has gone into the kind of work I share in my Life playlist.

The prayer that turned my anger into love

This was hard, though, because my mind told me, and other people told me, thankfully not my wife, but other people told me: a good son never gives up on his mother. If you want to be a good son, you just show up, no matter what. Family is forever, no matter what. People have told me that. And other people have said, hey, I had to let go of my mother too; she was too sick for me to stand to be around anymore.

One thing that really helped me: I was in conflict, upset, and I prayed for guidance. I imagined talking to my mother when she was the age she is in the pictures from when I was a little boy, and asking her, Mom, 30 or 35 years from now, when you get like this, what should I do? I pictured her and my dad just saying, go on with your life. You don't need to stick around. Go on with your life. I had a really good cry, and I was able to change my anger at my mother into love, and to realize that when she was my age, she would have told me, if that's what's happening, move on with your life, take care of yourself. She would never have wanted me to let her drag me down.

I'm grateful to talk about this today, because I've known I should make this video, I've known I needed to talk about this, but I didn't want to. I thought, well, I don't want to share my mother's business. But my mother's business is my business. We can't really separate, in our lives, what is my business versus what is your business, especially when we have close relationships. This is exactly why it's so important to choose our close relationships carefully.

My family just got home from visiting my mother, so I hope they had a wonderful time. I'm glad I was here working through this, because it helps me remember how we got here today. I would love to have a wonderful relationship with my mother in the future, and I'm open to that, but I will not have anything less than a wonderful relationship with my mother. I told her that a bunch of times over the years, and I made it clear: I only have good, healthy, happy relationships with people, and I will let go of any relationship, I don't care who it is, that doesn't meet those standards.

I hope this is useful for you. This has been one of the biggest things going on in my life in 2024, straight from the heart.

How to Forgive a Parent Who Disowned You

From my video published October 14, 2022.

My friends, I'm here today to help you if you have a parent who has disowned you. And this could apply in other situations too, but the specific situation I want to talk about is how to forgive a parent who disowned you.

Having a parent who disowned you, who said things like "you're dead to me," who refused to talk to you for the rest of your life, can be very painful. I'm familiar with this — not for myself, but through my mother.

My mother's parents told her she was dead to them

My mother's parents chose to disown her. They didn't talk to her. Maybe my grandpa had the tiniest minute or two of conversation, but they told her, you're dead to us. They asked her to choose between my dad and them. She chose my dad and she went in the army. And they said, you're dead to us. They proceeded to not have a relationship with her for the last 20 years — more than 20 years — of their lives. The last time I saw them was 1994, which is the last time my mom saw them as well.

So this was a painful experience for everybody in the family to deal with. Obviously, definitely for my mom, but for everybody else involved too. This was a tough experience for all of us. So I had this conversation with my mom, which I'm sharing here with you now to give you the benefit of the experience.

How the rift happened

My mom has obviously been very hurt a lot of times over her parents disowning her. She had a pretty nice childhood growing up — my grandfather was an engineer at Ford, and they were materially provided for. Unfortunately, though, the relationship as they grew into adulthood just didn't happen. So my mom was very hurt over being disowned.

And I'll tell you the situation. My mom had a husband that her parents really liked, who was very abusive to her, lied to her, maybe cheated on her, and threatened to kill her. And my mom's parents put on this huge wedding for that husband. They liked that husband. And my mom finally decided to get out of that abusive relationship and get a divorce.

So when she did that, she ended up with my dad. And when she ended up with my dad, she got pregnant while she was still in the relationship — or, she hadn't technically gotten divorced yet. They were waiting for the papers. And my dad was an alcoholic, drug addict, sex addict, and a gambler. He was consistently getting thrown out of his house, and not reliable in terms of earning income. My mom quit her job because she was pregnant with me, and it was way too much to work as a veterinarian at the racetrack while she was pregnant. So my mom quit her job when she gave birth to me, and she moved in with my dad's parents.

And once she moved in with my dad's parents, that ended up being tough for her parents to deal with. And then my mom didn't know how to provide any other way than to go in the army. So she went in the army, and was then looking at moving with me down to Texas. My dad was going to meet us down there because he'd been kicked out of his house.

And at some point in this equation, my mom's parents said, it's either your husband — so my dad — it's either us or them, one of the two. They wanted her to just rely on them instead of relying on my dad's parents, and not go in the army, and stay there and be with them. So she said, no, I'm not doing that. I'm not giving up my husband. So they said, you're dead to us, that's it.

And they visited a couple of times. They ended up getting thrown off the military base where my mom was stationed. And then it led to, in 1994, we came to visit, they had some huge fight, and that was it. No more talking, no more anything at that point. The relationship was over. So my mom didn't get to have a relationship with her parents for the rest of her life. And she was, as you can understand, quite pained over it.

There's a way you can forgive your parents

So I was talking to her about this as she was reflecting on the hurt she was experiencing as a result of being treated this way by her parents. And what I told her is, I said, Mom, there's a way you can forgive your parents. There's a way you can make this into a good thing. She's like, well, how's that?

I said, Mom, the whole life — if your parents hadn't done what they did, you wouldn't have gotten to have this entire life experience that you got to have. My mom had a 20-year career in the army where she got up to the rank of colonel. She loved what she did and was very good at it, being a veterinarian in the army. And we lived all over the world. We had a very adventurous life, going to all these different places around the world.

Our entire life happened the way it did because of how my mom's parents treated her. We wouldn't have gotten to have this entire life if her parents had actually been there and been what you would think of as good parents. We got to have this life of traveling around the world, of my mom being in the military. We got to have a very interesting and exciting and adventurous life because my mom went in the army. If her parents hadn't cut her off, if her parents hadn't acted the way they acted, we would have all had an entirely different life.

And I told my mom, you can be grateful your parents cut you off, because that gave us the chance to have the life we got to have. Because of your parents acting the way they did, we got to live the way we did. If her parents hadn't cut her off, she would have ended up staying in Michigan, and we would have not gone into the military. I'd probably still be in Michigan today. So I helped my mom see that her parents cutting us off, in a lot of ways, actually gave us the chance to have the entire life that we're having today. If they hadn't done that, we would have had a whole different life. I share these kinds of conversations more in my Life playlist, where I work through this stuff out loud.

Finding gratitude for what looks like a tragedy

So what really helps in life is when you can find a way to be grateful for the things that you might think of as tragedies — like somebody getting cut off by their parents. You might think of this as purely bad, purely a tragedy, purely wrong. Well, there were a lot of positive parts to this happening. And the positive part was that we got to have an entirely different life.

You can come back to the basic idea that if you're grateful for the life you have today, everything in the past ends up being valuable experience. If your parents cut you off, and however they mistreated you, the justice is in the healing. The justice is in appreciating exactly where you're at today. We got to have the life we had because of how my mom's parents treated us. And yes, it was hard, but the justice is in the healing. We are all healed, we're all whole. If you're carrying a heavy loss right now, I wrote more about this in my guide to healing after heartache and dealing with tragedy.

It's funny — when I'm telling this story I sometimes get my mom and my wife confused. But the point holds: we got to have the life we had because of how my mom's parents treated us. And my mom has learned something from all of it. My mom really treasures the relationship she has with me and with my brother, because she didn't get to have a relationship with her parents as an adult.

Turn the story around

So the miraculous thing to do is to turn the story of "my parents were horrible, my parents shouldn't have done this, my parents shouldn't have treated me this way" around into: well, what opportunities did you have because of that? So much of the pain we carry comes from the way we've been hurt, and it helps to remember that hurt people hurt people — your parents were very likely passing on their own wounds.

I've read so many inspiring books and seen so many inspiring stories. For example, if you look up the book Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins — he got to be a Navy SEAL. And one reason he was able to be a Navy SEAL is because his father was so brutal to him and beat him so much growing up that he could handle the pain of being a Navy SEAL. Somebody like me might not have been able to be a Navy SEAL, because I didn't get beaten like that. I got spanked and hit occasionally, but I didn't have that brutal upbringing.

And my mom — we got to have the life we have, which we love. Her parents, essentially, gave us a gift. By cutting us off, they gave us the freedom to go live in the military and have this adventurous life that we never would have had otherwise.

None of this means you have to pretend the hurt didn't happen, or rush back into a relationship that isn't safe. Forgiveness and boundaries can live side by side — I learned that the hard way, and I wrote about one of them in the boundary that finally let me enjoy Christmas Eve. You can be grateful for the life that grew out of the rupture and still hold a line about how you're treated going forward.

So I hope hearing that experience is helpful for you, to appraise your situation and to see a new way to look at things. I love each of you and really appreciate you being here.

My Dad Drove In to Keep Me Alive

Originally published February 9, 2019.

This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.

I was scared to drink because of what I would do next, and I was terrified for my own life.

Then, I got drunk the next Saturday night.

I remember having this sense of hopelessness about me, that it won't even help ease the pain if I got drunk.

The dispatcher wasn't talking to me after my outburst for a little while, and I was out looking to run into a girl at the bar. I was at the bar all by

myself and God, I was miserable. I had a few beers at the bar, I went home and I hit the lowest, most hopeless point of my entire life. I was in unbearable pain, drunk, and convinced that nothing would ever get better, and I reached a moment where I truly did not want to live anymore. I'm not going to describe what I did or how, because the details do not matter and I never want to put them in anyone's head. What matters is what happened next. The next day I was still in that hopeless place, feeling like a filthy, unlovable piece of shit with nothing to look forward to. And thank God, I trusted my parents enough to tell my dad the truth about how far down I had gone. My dad had been to some very dark places himself, so he understood exactly where I was. I had never heard him so hurt, and through his pain he said, "Alright, Son. You're going to be okay. Just finish up with your shifts and when you get off, go to work today and go to work tomorrow, and I'm going to drive over and I'm going to come stay with you for a little while."

I had been trying to get my parents to move near me then because I had this sense that I needed to be near my family, that I needed to get out of being by myself. I needed to be around people who loved me. I had been trying to get my parents to move near me, but they had told me that I had to quit drinking if they were going to move near me. Looking back, surrounding yourself with people who genuinely want you to get well changes everything, and that is exactly why you can book a private one-on-one call with me instead of trying to carry it all by yourself.

I thought, "I'm not going to quit drinking. I don't have a problem. I'm fine."

And I wouldn't quit drinking.

So, they said, "Alright. Well, we're not going to move near you then. You don't care about us moving near you that much if you don't quit drinking."

My dad came to stay with me right before my birthday, right before I turned 25 and that was a relief because I knew there was no way I was going to be able to get through my birthday sober.

At this point, I knew I had to drink whether I wanted to or not. The pain was so great. I hated being sober and thinking about the shit I had done and my whole social life. All my friends, everything I did, all the video games were tied up with drinking.

Basically, all I did when I was off, especially on night shift was to get drunk. My dad came to visit, and the corporal interviews were about to happen.

Now, keep in mind, I had made the decision before this already, but I still tried to make sure that was how it would work out. My dad came to visit for my birthday. As soon as I got off work my dad drove down and stayed with me and it was a wonderful two-week break.

Meanwhile, I had been on the outs with the dispatcher. She had been seeing the guy a lot that she was with before, and I had since apologized to her one night.

I had gone to Sonic and got her like a drink or something, I came back and apologized to her. She initially didn't look like she was taking the apology at all, but then she later said that she thought, "Wow, no one ever brings me something when they apologize."

I thought, "Damn, that's low standards right there."

I had not been talking much with the dispatcher. We had had some bad fights, I had apologized, and then we hadn't been talking a whole lot. She was going on this cruise and I didn't know where things were going at all with her, she was all over the last guy.

She was on this cruise for like a week and she didn't have her phone. It was a merciful relief because I knew I couldn't talk to her and every time I drank, I would certainly start trying to talk to her. My dad came to visit while she was on the cruise.

Now, just before my dad came to visit, just on one of the other nights, I was at work walking around. This might have been right after the escort or right before that lowest night. I remember I was at work and I was in so

much pain. It was like nine at night and I fell down in the middle of the area where you could walk around near the gym, near the Strom Thurmond center.

I fell down in full uniform and I just relaxed. All the life just went out of my body. I just fell right on the pavement, laid there and cried. I don't know how long I was talking to my parents on the phone as I laid there and cried.

This thing with the dispatcher opened me wide up. I had tried to hide from my feelings and live a life without feelings before this, but it opened me wide up. There was no more hiding from my feelings. I was feeling life in all its glory and misery now.

My dad came to stay with me right after that lowest point. We had a great time. He took me out to eat. He took me to JC Penney to buy me a new suit for my corporal interview that I could wear to the courtroom to look professional after I had got made fun of one day for going to court in my tennis shoes and shorts, and the judge had dismissed my case because of my appearance despite the defendant not even showing up.

My dad got me looking sharp, bought me a nice new suit for my birthday and we had a beautiful time while he was there for my birthday.

It was a little tricky because this was the same night shift still. My dad was there for it and I would sleep during the day. He would get up early, and I would sleep in the bed. I don't know what he did all day while I was in bed sleeping, but we kind of rotated the bed.

He would get in, and sleep at night. I would try to play video games quietly when I was off, or when I was at work. I would be working, and then we would switch. I would get in the bed and sleep. He would be up during the day, and then we would have like six hours or so where we would hang

out together during the day.

One night, I went running in the garage. I went to campus, it was raining and I wanted to go running. It was funny, as a police officer, I felt like I own the campus even when I was off duty, as I knew where all these things were.

I went in and drove to a parking garage where I parked and I ran up and down in this garage one night. I just was full of energy. I hadn't drunk for a few days so my body was starting to feel better. I went and ran around this parking garage, and then I came back home and I remember seeing a message from the dispatcher.

She said she had just gotten back from her cruise, and I noticed I had this energy, I had this feeling she had a whole different attitude now that she had broken things off with that other guy. She was ready to be with me and she had a nice time relaxing, getting some clarity on the cruise, and she had forgiven me for being just absolutely bat shit crazy before.

We were ready to start afresh and I had this horrible and yet exciting feeling, right as my dad was about to leave and I was about to be back on my own, that we had just gotten started with all this shit, that I had only even seen the beginning of this disaster, and that's what happened.

My dad went home and I started talking to the dispatcher again. My dad left me, I was feeling good, I hadn't drunk the whole time he was there and now I thought, "Okay. The only problem I had before, I was just falling apart because things weren't going well with the dispatcher. All I need to do is just be nice with her. We will have things go well with her and there won't be any more problems. Everything will be fine."

I remember right after my dad left, right back at the bar with my friends thinking, "You know what? It has been a couple of weeks. I'm doing well

with the dispatcher. Everything's all good. There's no reason I can't go out to the bar with my police buddies and have a beer or two. Come on, you know. I am not that bad."

And for a little while, after Dad left, things were pretty smooth. The rest of that night shift, I was really on edge, yet there weren't any more really stupid things that happened immediately. And yet, what ended up happening -- Actually, I fast forward a little bit.

I stayed sober for a little while after my dad left. I had a sense that I needed to stay sober or things were going to get really bad. I fast forward to the next time. If you are at one of those turning points where you can feel things could go either way, it really helps to talk it through privately, and you are welcome to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

So, I stayed sober after my dad left and I was talking with the dispatcher.

Things were going really well. So well that one day we were talking on the phone, she had been saying she liked this song, "Birthday Sex," and I had cried over that one night because I wanted to have sex with her, and who was she having sex with?

I ended up talking to her on the phone the next day and she told me,

"Jerry, I'm not going to fuck you just to be your friend."

Wow.

Could the message have been any more clear?

She wanted to be my girlfriend. She wanted to be exclusive with me and I was so messed up I couldn't see that even though that's all I thought I wanted.

All I thought I wanted was a beautiful girlfriend and for her to be it. She was perfect. I loved her and she was the best. All I wanted was for her to be my girlfriend, and yet, when she said that, a very clear signal, I said,

"That's fine. We can just be friends."

What?

What the fuck kind of dumb shit is that?

I can't believe I said that shit. What is wrong with the guy I was?

The guy I was then, was so fucking clueless, but thank God, we have gotten through that. Maybe it was great that I didn't say yes because given what had already happened, I don't know, we might have murdered each other if we would have actually been boyfriend and girlfriend.

I'm grateful now that I did not say that I would be her boyfriend and yet, at the same time, it was just an example of utter stupidity. That day, what was going on, there was an event that I was working that she was going to.

What was the event?

It was a comedy show, and she wanted to go with me, but I was working and I wouldn't get off work to go with her, and then she had said, "Okay, well, I'll take my friend," the friend that she had seen the night that we had sex.

She said, "Okay, I'll take him and we can go together then and I'll see you there while you're working."

Then, I saw her there while I was working. For some reason, there was this other girl. I don't remember where I met her if I had met her before.

There was this other girl there who was all over me that ended up asking me to go in the bathroom and have sex with her while I was in my uniform.

I did think about it. I thought about going into the bathroom and having sex with this girl. I don't know who this girl was. I don't remember how I

even met her. I might have seen her at the bar one night, or I might have seen her at work one day.

She was drunk and she asked me to come in the bathroom and have sex with her while I was working.

I said, "No, no."

Then, I ran into the dispatcher and the guy she was with, and she just kind of blew past me really quick. I guess if she had wanted to be with me and she was with this other guy, and here I was working, it was pretty awkward for everyone.

So she just kind of walked by really quick and said hi. This event was at the new basketball arena and it was packed, so there was lots of stuff to do as well and I remember talking to her that night and feeling just really dumb that I hadn't gone with her because I could have got someone else to work the overtime assignment.

My friend really wanted to work that overtime assignment because you were getting time and a half to work a comedy event. It was absolutely ideal if you wanted to make some extra money. A fun thing to do and he easily said he wanted to work the event. I easily could have given him the event and went with her instead.

But no, I didn't.

So, what I did instead, I talked to her that night on the phone.

I said, "Look, I'd really like to do something with you. We are both off next Monday and Tuesday."

This was right when we switched to day shift.

It has been a long month I've been telling this story over.

You may think, "Damn. Yeah, this is a 10-minute story you have told in an hour and 20 minutes now."

I think it's really good, but it's horrible. I hope maybe it is useful for you.

So, we ended up talking and deciding that we were going to go on this weekend trip together out of town.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Forgiving My Father and Setting Boundaries With My Mother

On this page

Yoga, Family Trips, and Bringing My Mom Closer

Forgiving My Father and Setting Boundaries With My Mother

On this page

Yoga, Family Trips, and Bringing My Mom Closer

I Finally Set Boundaries with My Mother

Why I love my mother from a distance

The years I called her almost every day

The negative feedback loop I wasn't allowed to mention

The breaking point, and the broken hip

The tough love that saved my own life

Why I can picture her thriving

No one in active addiction can be in my inner circle

The massage therapist who opened the door

What my mother told me to do, and what I asked her back

The hardest part is not moving the boundary

Picturing the relationship I actually want

Why I have to get this right for my kids

The emotional stability I found by stepping back

The prayer that turned my anger into love

How to Forgive a Parent Who Disowned You

My mother's parents told her she was dead to them

How the rift happened

There's a way you can forgive your parents

Finding gratitude for what looks like a tragedy

Turn the story around

My Dad Drove In to Keep Me Alive

Want me to make a video for you?