I have two cousins. Two. And I didn’t even meet them until we were all adults.

So, yeah—when people talk about the support they get from big, extended families, it’s not exactly the world I know.

The importance of chosen family

You want to talk about family? Mine has never really fit the greeting-card mold. Forget the idea that blood is always thicker than water. Turns out, the people who pick up the phone, drive hours at the drop of a hat, or tell you that you’re not the crazy one? Sometimes, they’re not even related to you. Sometimes, they are a middle school friend of your mom’s.

Let’s get real: not every family is safe.

Not everyone gets the shining, warm, leave-it-to-beaver home life you see on TV.

(If you’re sitting there thinking, “well, my nuclear family is...fine?”—hold onto that. There are therapists out here with new boats thanks to all of us with tricky dynamics.)

So, what do you do when your 'people' aren’t your people?

What does it mean to build and value chosen family—for neurodivergent folks, folks on the margins, and, well, anyone who’s ever needed someone on their side when the world doesn’t play fair?

In this episode of "Different, not broken", I’m sharing real, maybe-too-honest stories about losing someone who was never 'official family' but was instrumental to my life.

About generational differences in holding onto friends, about the random soulmates and honorary aunts you collect along the way.

The secret sauce of having someone who just believes in you—often long after you stop believing in yourself.

About how you can cobble together your own safety net when the original factory settings are...suboptimal, at best.

If you’ve ever wondered where you fit, or have mourned the distance (or absence) in your 'real' family, or want practical hope that you can find your people, this one is for you.

Consider this your permission slip: family isn’t always about who shares your last name, but about who shows up, sees you, and gives you space to be exactly who you are—even if that means starting a new job at 69 or reminding you to tell the world to get lost when you need it most.

Hit play to find your new favorite survival strategy for living different—not broken.

Because you deserve more than 'good enough'—you deserve family that’s actually safe.

(And maybe a few wild stories about just how weird and wonderful that can look.)

As always, your support helps keep the podcast going, keep assessments accessible, and keep a whole lot of therapists’ kids in college. Every listen and share goes further than you think.

Let’s take down the 'real family only' myth, together.

And then be sure to get yourself signed up for all our updates!

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I have, like, maybe two friends left from high school.

Like, I don't talk to these people.

I don't really want to talk to these people.

They're not people that I engage with very often.

Every now and then, one of them pops up, and I'm.

I remember that.

I like that person.

But there's actually a teacher from high school who I still talk to a lot and is one of our group leaders at lb.

But as soon as I was done with high school, like, I was done.

What I find very bizarre, though, is that my mother, who obviously comes from a very different generation and a very different frame of mind, I mean, she still talks to people who she graduated high school with, like, literally 50 years ago, which blows my mind.

And they, like, remember each other's lives and, like, have all sorts of stories to tell.

And, like, I don't remember anything about high school.

It's not like I was impaired or anything.

Like, I just.

I don't know, maybe I blocked it out.

I don't know.

I remember being a lot skinnier.

That's it.

That's all I remember.

But anyway, she's got this, like, group of friends.

They still talk all the time.

Some of them have been through multiple husbands.

Some of them have gotten to be, like, really close with our family.

And so, like, literally minutes before we started doing this, my mom called, which is really a cause for joy.

Usually it's a quick send to voicemail, and there's a whole nother episode, many episodes.

Series of therapy sessions is really what it is.

Many therapists whose children have been put through college by me, about why she gets sent a voicemail.

But anyway, she text me afterward and said, you know, I need to talk to you.

And I was on the phone, so I couldn't talk to her.

But she did send me through a message and let me know that one of them passed away, I guess, at the end of last year, which we didn't know.

And she was like, for everything that is missing in my relationship with my mother, she was that.

And after my dad died, she gave me one of the biggest gifts I've ever gotten from anybody in that apparently my dad had confided in her about things about me that he had never told me.

And I didn't have any way to know that.

Why would I know that?

And she shared them with me and things that I never realized in a million years that my dad ever would have thought about me.

And, like, good stuff.

I mean, like, we had a great relationship, so none of it was surprising.

But I just didn't know that.

I didn't know that he had said these things.

And so as I was grieving him, she was giving me these like very powerful gifts of insight that I could not have had.

And so she was so instrumental in that process.

And she was also the person I could call and be like, my mother's nuts, right?

And she would say, oh yes.

And she's been that way her whole life.

And she was one of the few people who kind of looked at life probably the way that I did, which is like, fuck em if they can't take a joke.

She was always independent.

She always, I think she was married like 45 times, maybe slightly less than that.

But she got her doctorate in nursing when she was 69 years old and started practicing at 69 years old.

I could call her and say like, I have this idea and I think I want to start a practice and I think I want to do it by myself and I think I want to do it for xyz.

And she would say, yeah, cool.

In the way that my dad always did.

She believed in me in a way that I think maybe only he ever did.

And so I have not fully processed this yet, obviously, because I just found out.

And also, like, I'm hurt that this happened last year and I didn't know about it.

But also it was a weird relationship.

Like I don't know what your mom's middle school tangential friend is to you when you think you're an adult and you don't even know her children.

But yeah, it was just unexpected and it was shocking and it obviously derailed most of my day.

But I think it speaks to this bigger thing that is so important when we're building community.

And it's this idea of chosen family, right?

And I have a family and I have an involved family and I have a family that for the most part means well or you know, and certainly my dad meant well, but even in that somewhat strong nuclear family, like there are still people who aren't safe and there are still ways that that family has been not safe.

And that did matter.

I mean, it mattered.

And obviously again, lots of therapists, children are going to college thanks to me.

But to say that, yeah, okay, I'm never going to have that relationship with my mom, but I do have it with someone else.

Like I was gifted with women who showed me how to be what I wanted to be when that is not the example that was set for me.

And I'm not related to any of them.

We don't have a big extended family.

I mean, I think I have two cousins from total.

I have two cousins, and I didn't meet them until we were all adults.

And so every person who's been with me for most of my life, except for my actual siblings, is chosen family.

It's also really common, I think, in Jewish families as much as Jewish families can be big.

A lot of those families are built on rebuilding community after the Holocaust.

And so, like, in general, I think a lot of Jewish families are made out of that uncle who's not really your uncle, but it doesn't matter and you wouldn't know it.

So the point being, aside from the fact that I just need to say those things, is that when we talk about building community and how community is so incredibly instrumental in figuring out who you are and who's safe and how to create psychological safety for yourself, it may not be your parents.

It may not be somebody who's actually related to you.

My dad hasn't answered my calls in, like, eight years.

It's rude, but it very well could be somebody who will still pick up the phone every time you call, will still jump in the car when they find out that you went into labor six weeks early and drive four hours to get there.

Will still validate you when you, like, think all of the people around you are losing their goddamn minds.

But, like, they seem fine with it, and you just want to make sure that it's not you.

And at this stage in my life where, like, I'm certainly not going to pick up more parents, like, I had my fill of those.

Those relationships are community.

Those are the people that we can rely on.

And so I just think that's as we talk about community building.

It doesn't have to be a nuclear family who is not safe for you or is not interested in validating the things that you need validated.

And you might get lucky like I did, and have a random crazy lady who's just as ambitious as you are, who happens to have, like, 50 years on you.

No, not 50.

That's probably mean.

She'll smack me if I say that.

I don't think it's 50.

It's probably closer to 40.

She'll come back from the dead and karate chop me in the neck for saying that.

It's like 39.

It's 39.

But who's just far enough ahead of you doing life the way that you want to do life to show you that not only can you be, like, super successful and find your own way, but you can do it while telling everybody else to fuck off.

And that's probably the biggest lesson I got from her.

So, yeah, I think that's it for that.